Religion’s signature vices stem from institutional power and doctrinal rigidity, not belief itself

Evidence

Moreover, defenders of religion point out that some of the sins attributed to religion are in fact caused by something else that gets entangled with religion. William James, one of the great founders of modern psychology who took a great interest in religion, put it this way: … The baseness so commonly charged to religion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable to religion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 510

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes ‘religion proper’ from its ‘corporate’ and ‘dogmatic’ partners—a useful analytic split between belief, institution, and doctrine.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Big God integration: institutional enforcement (Baumard’s partner choice, Norenzayan’s watcher) may be what makes religion dangerous, not the belief in watchful gods itself.