Say what you will about Christianity, it does encourage people to lead clean lives and reinforces that message with effective social pressure. To people with certain kinds of problems that can be incredibly helpful. There's a reason why Christianity has so many turn-around stories.
"There's a reason why Christianity has so many turn-around stories."
In absolute terms, sure, because there are lots of Christians and of course some of them will have a turn-around story.
But if you take the ratio of turn-around/number of Christians and compared that to other religions or atheists I'm not sure you'd get a very impressive number.
This is all because of confirmation bias again. It's easier to see the couple thousands of success stories attributed to a religion than the millions of failures we don't hear about.
Discipline is good for a certain kind of person. Religion provides discipline for those who have no self-discipline.
I don't see why so many on this thread need to convince themselves that religion never helps people. It does. I've seen it. Does it help everyone? Probably not. Is it a net positive for society as a whole? I don't think so. However, it clearly and surely helps some people some of the time.
I don't have any numbers, just personal anecdotes, but I've sure seen people saved by religion who would otherwise probably be dead, and I'm a hardcore atheist radical.
