The same traditions have produced both charity and cruelty, so the variable is people

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the historical record defeats both rival answers. Every major religious tradition has produced hospitals and inquisitions, abolitionists and slaveholders, people who sheltered refugees at risk to themselves and people who denounced them, all citing the same scriptures. If religion as such caused the good, the cruelty would be inexplicable; if it caused the harm, so would the charity. A cause that is present in both outcomes cannot be what distinguishes them. What does vary, proponents argue, is everything else: who holds power, what material interests are at stake, whether dissent is permitted, how the texts are read and by whom. Religion supplies vocabulary, organisation and legitimacy, and these are instruments. An institution that can mobilise people and confer moral authority is extremely useful to whoever controls it, and it has been controlled at different times by reformers and by tyrants. The outcomes track the controllers rather than the creed. Proponents note that the same point holds of other large human institutions. Nationalism, ideology, science and the state have each been turned to building and to destruction, and we do not usually conclude that any of them is inherently one or the other. Religion, on this view, is a human institution of that kind: deeply consequential, never neutral in its effects, but not carrying a moral valence of its own independent of its use. Because the same religions have produced both the best and the worst human conduct, the determining variable lies in the people and power structures deploying them, so this argument concludes that religion is in itself neither good nor evil.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Both evaluative positions reply that this understates religion's distinctive contribution. Critics argue that religion is not a neutral instrument, because unfalsifiable claims and divine authority make disputes harder to settle and cruelty easier to feel righteous about, which is a property of the thing itself. Defenders argue that the charitable and consoling work is produced by religion's specific teachings and congregational structure, and would not have happened without them, so the good is not incidental either.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] A factor present in both the good and the bad outcomes may still be what makes either possible at the scale observed, since the same institution can organise relief and organise persecution. Being common to both shows that religion is not the sole differentiator, not that it is inert. [Rejecting P3] Naming power, interests and interpretation as the variables does not establish neutrality. Religion may be what supplies the authority those interests capture, which is a causal role rather than none. [Rejecting C] The conclusion treats instrument and neither good nor evil as equivalent. An instrument can be well or badly suited to particular ends, and the argument would have to show that religion lends itself to benefit and harm in equal measure, which no premise addresses.