Perhaps the single largest voluntary institution of our modern world—bound together not by police and taxation, not by salaries and managers, but by voluntary donations flowing from its members—is the Catholic Church.

It's too large to be held together by individual negotiations, like a group task in a hunter-gatherer band. But in a larger world with more people to be infected and faster transmission, we can expect more virulent memes. The Old Testament doesn't talk about Hell, but the New Testament does. The Catholic Church is held together by affective death spirals—around the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders. By promises of eternal happiness and eternal damnation—theologians don't really believe that stuff, but many ordinary Catholics do. By simple conformity of people meeting in person at a Church and being subjected to peer pressure. &c.

We who have the temerity to call ourselves "rationalists", think ourselves too good for such communal bindings.

And so anyone with a simple and obvious charitable project—responding with food and shelter to a tidal wave in Thailand, say—would be better off by far pleading with the Pope to mobilize the Catholics, rather than with Richard Dawkins to mobilize the atheists.

For so long as this is true, any increase in atheism at the expense of Catholicism will be something of a hollow victory, regardless of all other benefits.

True, the Catholic Church also goes around opposing the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa. True, they waste huge amounts of the money they raise on all that religious stuff. Indulging in unclear thinking is not harmless, prayer comes with a price.

To refrain from doing damaging things, is a true victory for a rationalist...

Unless it is your only victory, in which case it seems a little empty.

If you discount all harm done by the Catholic Church, and look only at the good... then does the average Catholic do more gross good than the average atheist, just by virtue of being more active?

Perhaps if you are wiser but less motivated, you can search out interventions of high efficiency and purchase utilons on the cheap... But there are few of us who really do that, as opposed to planning to do it someday.

Now you might at this point throw up your hands, saying: "For so long as we don't have direct control ...