We should judge religions by empyrical evidence in lieu of religious texts.

As a quick rebuttal to your first rebuttal...what if a large group rather than a small group has 0 morality? There's no way to know if a group's actions are representative of their religion without checking the sources (religious texts). I think part of the reason you've felt as if you and previous debaters you've encountered were talking past each other is because of the way you're defining your terms. Your description of religion, which includes songs, community, street preachers, slogans, billboards, sounds a lot more like culture than religion. A slogan created by a Christian is not necessarily a Christian slogan. A Christian street preacher who says that divorce and abortion are the most effective forms of worship is not in fact preaching Christianity. Religion purports to be revealed truth - revelation from God. At times it can indeed be a tangled web, but not so tangled as to be totally incomprehensible as I've said, and not as tangled as you describe. I think if you could define very specifically what you mean by religion it would be helpful. Next, the argument you lay out re: patriarchy seems to have moved away from your central point quite a bit. If you could explain the relevance of those points to the specific question of how we judge a religion that would be helpful. For now though I'll address a few of the claims. 1. Reading a book will make you patriarchal, viewing television will make you more matriarchal. In America, which anyone who talks about patriarchy considers to be a patriarchy, people watch television at far higher rates than they read, people watch television 6x as much as they read books during the week, and 7.15x as much on weekends (source below). Why isn't America a matriarchal society? Do you think the content of the writing or the video plays no role? Will a video about how men are better than women make you more matriarchal? Will a book about how women are better than men make you more patriarchal? You're making claims about causation, but early on in the source material you provide it's shown that the author clearly acknowledges correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation. You're misapplying the information from that source in being so specific with your claims. 2. Religion's main impact on society is encouraging people to read as opposed to the arts So to give one example where this is manifestly false, look at Catholicism. For hundreds of years this religion ruled the roost in Europe, creating a clearly patriarchal society. But...illiteracy was enormously widespread. As for encouraging people to read, in fact they were discouraged - the Bible wasn't translated from Latin so as to prevent people from being able to read it - instead they had to simply take what their priests told them on faith. Martin Luther's act of translating the Bible into common languages was a grave sin in the eyes of the church. People certainly were not being encouraged to read. To bring the example into modern times, the first results of a google search indicate that 60% of the Muslim world is illiterate, as of 2015. These people certainly are not being encouraged to read by religion. (Source below). 3. Scientists are always trying to control variables, by examining the texts along with empirical evidence we're adding variables, complicating the issue and increasing the chance of error. Yes, scientists do want to control variables, which is why irrelevant variables don't merit consideration. Irrelevant variables in the examination of a religion include things like..slogans, billboards, songs, etc. As I said before, religions, especially the three major ones, claim to be based on revealed truth from God. In seeking to understand a religion, the most relevant variable is the supposedly revealed truth from God, i.e. the religious texts. Here again I would say I think you're mixing up religion and culture, and would ask that you more clearly define what you mean by 'religion'. https://www.google.com... http://www.infoplease.com...