[TheOtherHobbes]

This would be more convincing if Catholics - actually religious people in general - were known for exemplary morals.

That's very much not the case.

Religion is demonstrably useless when it comes to practical morality, because it's not in any sense a coherent and stable moral system.

It's really about crafting individual and tribal justifications for arbitrary behaviours supported by various power hierarchies. Some may be considered moral, while others are clearly damaging, hateful, and abhorrent.

It's impossible to deny this without denying centuries of religious history.

There's far more of value in psychological research than there is any religious teaching. Even though it's just getting started, it's a far more coherent body of knowledge than the random mess of conflicting and contradictory opinions and justifications that the religious industries have generated.

[logicchains]

> This would be more convincing if Catholics - actually religious people in general - were known for exemplary morals.

I'm not sure how you'd propose to measure that, but in terms of charitable giving at least religious people have been found to give significantly more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...

[bandyaboot]

If you were trying to use charitable giving as a measure of morality, you’d have to somehow control for the collection plate effect which is more about response to peer pressure than morality.

[klyrs]

Okay now look at the statistics on rape of children and how the church protects those rapists. Does that square with "think of the children?" A dude with "free candy" painted on his panel van ticks the "charitable giving" box, right?