Organized Religion should be dismantled

Yet no one seriously talks about banning all heirarchies, probably because it would ironically have to be a heirarchical leader making such a call in the first place.Well, traditional anarchists are opposed to all forms of illegitimate hierarchy. They believe in a revolution in which the people rise up themselves to dismantle all hierarchy. I am a borderline-anarchist myself. I just chose specifically to talk about why organized religion should be dismantled, rather than all hierarchies, because that would be too broad of a debate.Heirarchies are inherent in any human pattern of organization; no building gets built without a work crew under the command of a crew supervisor. Worker cooperatives would actually be evidence against this. Worker cooperatives are businesses which are created without command of someone who has a meaningful position above the workers. There might be managers, but they are generally voted upon by the workers, which makes it a legitimate hierarchy as it has consent from the people who are being ruled over.For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the overall contribution of religion in history balances out to exactly zero - as many lives lost as saved, and vice versa. Would that not prove my opponent's point that such institutions are ultimately unnecessary?Yes, that would. Though I agree with what you basically said previously that it would be near impossible to measure the good versus bad of organized religions.Nothing about that is designed to make people happier, and the fact that the study did not determine religious people to be less happy strikes me as strong proof of the high value that can be placed on living successfully within a moral framework. I think the reason why this is the case is because irreligious people still try to, for the most part, live in the same moral framework, if not moreso. As pointed out(which I know you responded to, and I'll rebut it next) non-religious people commit less crime than religious people, suggesting that non-religious people actually live in a better moral framework than religious people. I reject my opponent's premise that examining the legal records of the faithful is an efficient metric for determining the success of organized religion in making one more moral. For one thing, legality and morality are not synonymous; per Doctor Martin Luther King's letter written while he was incarcerated, a moral person has a responsibility to violate unjust laws as surely as they have an obligation to follow just ones.Yes, but I would argue that morality and what is just is determined by a society as a whole. An unjust law would be one in which majority of people think it shouldn't be a law. An example of a modern day unjust law is the law that makes marijuana illegal. Majority of our society believes it should be legal, and so it would be okay to break that law. However, over all, there are only about 40,000 people in prison for marijuana-related crimes[5]. This wouldn't affect the statistics that much in relation to which people of which religious preference are in prison. For the most part, all of our other laws are just according to society. For another, declaration of membership in a particular organized religion is often just an inmate's way of ensuring a certain type of diet; an inmate who loves fish, for example, might claim to be Catholic when they are not just to make sure they get fish on Friday, or one might claim to be Jewish just to avoid eating ham sandwiches. This is an extremely common practice among inmates, and the entire 11.9% difference in those statistics could not unreasonably be assumed to fall within that purview.However, this is something that would need evidence to support it. As a separate entity existing within a democratic state, organized religion is as democratic as you can get, because attendance and participation within the religion are not compulsory; anyone can quit at any time, simply by ceasing to go to service. However, there is the problem of parents forcing their children to attend church. It's not democratic for them. Additionally, it can be argued that many people in an organized religion will just believe everything their leaders say, as they accept them as an authority figure for that religion. Organized religion discourages individuality and thinking for oneself. Sources:[5] http://www.rollingstone.com...