Consider the following comments on religion.
Religion is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
I have seen many people walk away from their faith, but never one who walked away happier.
Anonymous
With or without religion, good people will do good and evil people will do evil, but for good people to do evil takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
A society that loses its gods does not become free of worship, it only changes what it kneels to.
Faith asks for the one thing reason will not give: certainty without proof.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that religion is neither the root of our cruelty nor the source of our virtue, but a powerful amplifier of whatever a community already is. Open by granting the critic's point, that faith has been used to justify violence and to silence inquiry. Then complicate it: religion has also built hospitals, sustained the grieving and demanded justice from the powerful, so the ledger is not one sided. A strong third move suggests that the human impulse to worship persists even in secular societies, merely transferred to nations, markets or ideologies. Caution: resist treating all believers, or all sceptics, as a single type, since the interesting argument is about what faith does, not about caricatures of who holds it.