Did religion ever bring anything to mankind?

[struggle4progress]

111. Claims of approaches to universal truth are not necessary harmful, and

they have been common enough in history

The ancient Greek intelligentsia looked for "Reason" (logos) as a universal principle and produced a Platonist philosophy, still common among today's mathematicians, that regards the objects of pure thought as existing if they are consistent with logic. Physicists believe that there is an objective reality, that can be exposed by experiment, and they seek universal laws to describe it: John Wheeler in his text on Gravitation expresses the view that logic itself might underlie the structure of space-time. The criminal courts similarly assume the existence of an objective reality. Many people will agree with me that "It is wrong to gouge out the eyes of kittens for fun," even though "wrongness" is not measurable by instruments. The Christian gospels were originally written in Greek and belong to a tradition that includes a certain deference to the claims of logos, as (for example) stated in the Catholic catechism: It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason