I’m having conflicting thoughts about religion in shaping human history.
As an atheist, it seems obvious to me that if there were no religion from the start, the world would have been a better place than it is now. There would be no religious wars, honor killings, more freedom, no religious leaders abusing their powers, no waste of labor and money on religious things, etc. It may seem that we would be more educated and have better understanding.
My whole conflict arises from the fact that “fear is a better driver than education and reasoning.” As no system is efficient and perfect, the absence of religion would have caused more crimes. Religion promotes fear (the concept of an afterlife, hell) if you do something wrong. If there were no religion, humans may have committed numerous crimes without fearing consequences. You could say that it is due to religions that numerous wars have happened in history. But that is a tiny percentage of the whole population. Most people lived happier with religion as it introduced morals ,ethics and consequences for wrongdoing(big factor). One would think and question before doing something wrong.
You could also say that if we were non-religious from the start, we would have had better education, reasoning, different type ethics and morals etc. But as I said earlier, no system is efficient, and since non-religion doesn’t promote fear if you don’t get caught by others, there would be more crimes without fearing consequences if they don’t get caught by others, which was easy in the old days.
So, I’m thinking if religion did better in the early days.
And I know that nowadays it’s a different story, and non-religion is obviously better.
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We’d certainly be better off in the education/intelligence department if we promoted skepticism and criticized faith or any belief without evidence, but to be fair the word “better” is more broad than that…
Yes, but not just because of the lack of religions, but the lack of superstition that would require. Basically if everyone believed things based on physical evidence, rather than feelings, the world would be better. But, also, we as a species might not have survived our earliest days.
Religion is just a tool. A tool is only as good as the person using it.
Yes
Eh, looking through the comments (and its so nice to see that folks really giving some good thought to their comments on such a hot button topic), there’s not much I can add.
I fall into the “humans will find excuses” camp. I also think that religion isn’t a bad thing, per se. Even organized religion doesn’t have to be destructive at its extreme. But it’s also inevitable that the section of humanity that craves power and control is going to use whatever avenue for such that they find.
Since all religions are susceptible to zealotry, I don’t think we’ll ever be free of religious zealots, which means there’s always going to be people insisting that other people follow their religion’s rules, or else.
Now, that isn’t exclusive to religion, but it’s the obvious example of that kind of thinking. You can look at pretty much any bloc that’s belief based and find zealots. Politics, whoooo boy! Veganism. Even fandoms of cartoons have zealotry in a way, though it tends to be a much less invasive kind, akin to music genre fanatics; it’s more gatekeeping than proselytizing. But you do run into the kind of obsessive fandom where if you don’t like it, you suck; and you have to watch/listen/read.
Now, it may seem strange to connect religious zealotry to fandoms, but it’s the same underlying way of thinking. People are just prone to wanting to control other people, and will use any excuse to do so.
That proclivity is present even in people that think they don’t think that way, and actively try to weed it out of themselves. Ever catch yourself thinking "the whole world would be better if they all insert personal belief here? That’s the underlying kind of thinking that can snowball into the bigger kind of problem. Doesn’t even matter if it’s true on a factual level, it’s the way it’s thought about and approached that’s the key. If anything, a belief being highly factual and demonstrably true makes it more likely to turn into zealotry.
So, better without religion? Eh, nah, not imo. Just different in detail.
i think if we stayed with the idea of God’s representing natural phenomena and being flawed characters vs single deity that is all seeing all powerful and a singular conduit and thus used by ambitious men and women to control the masses be it a pope or televangelist.
As we learned more about the ways of science I think they would have gracefully faded into the background and turned into the fables they are today.
Iran and Turkey would be a better place, that’s for sure. Especially Iran was a free country, women rights and everything. Now priests control the country, and women are getting killed for not wearing their clothing “correct”.
Also, the whole western world entered the “dark ages” which was a big push backwards in terms of living standards and science. That was because of religion, so we might be 100-200 years ahead now, if it wasn’t for that.
This is a hard question. I think that we would be better off if more people adopted secular worldviews. But throughout history? I don’t think we can simply say “what if there were no religions” – we’d have to be completely different creatures for it to have gone that way. But I do think we’d be better off if we were that kind of creature.
It’s interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion. I’m no anthropologist, but as far as I know, every civilization to have ever existed has formed one. Forming a religion is as natural as forming a language. Clearly, it’s a thing we do. Lacking an explanation for our questions, from “what are rainbows?” to “what happens when we die?” we will apparently just fill something in. Everyone did it.
For us to have not formed religions, we’d have to be more comfortable with uncertainty. We’d need to have been better at accepting that we don’t know some things, and we can doggedly look for answers, but we shouldn’t insist that we know something before we really do. And I think our species kind of sucks at that.
If we were better at accepting uncertainty while still pursuing answers, we’d all be better off. And maybe, as a side effect of that, we wouldn’t have formed religions.
When Og and Bog saw the sun come over the hill one morning, and Og was like, “Hey Bog, how do you think that happens?” Bog should’ve said, “I don’t know. Maybe someday, someone will know.” Instead, Bog went off on some real bullshit, and now here we are.
I don’t believe so. I believe religions are human creations and as such, they can’t be awful if people don’t have that awful side to begin with. If religions disappeared overnight or were magically erased from existence we would still struggle with the same issues, only with a different flavour. Perhaps there would be no lies on certain topics but I’m not too sure that would make a massive difference overall.
Yes. At the very least we might be more honest about why we keep slaughtering each other.
Humans are volatile by nature. If it wasn’t religion it would be race I’d it’s not race it would be accent and if not that then something else. Everyone one could be gray blobs and there will be someone saying "Actually We’re the Grayest and the Blobiest”.
Peace will only be achieved when humanity is unified and if that happen we stop being human and something else.
I’m a mortician/postmortem scientist, who used to run the WSU Funeral History Museum. Based on my research, I don’t think humans could exist without some type of religion/code/customs. As long as there has been death, even in ancient/prehistoric times, humans have been doing specific procedures, to say goodbye to their fallen loved ones.
There’s writings in almost every culture that teach us about what these civilizations believed, and some are beautiful, while others are kindof terrifying, but it all wrapped around people trying to cope with death.
Even if we found out complete proof for what actually happens when you die and after death, some people are still going to prefer their religion’s ideas because it brings them more peace. Death seems to be the clinch pin for all religions, and I honestly don’t think we’d have religion, if we didn’t understand the concept of death. People just want something to believe in.
Now, the garbage parts of religion are created by people seeking power, money, and control, and as long as there’s those who desire to conquer others, religion will be made up and used as a scapegoat, as to why certain people deserve power.
@Shelbyeileen I have a pet theory, that religion is basically a hardware vulnerability exploitation. Vulnerability being “we can’t comprehend death, physically”. Because trying to reconstruct non-existence in our world model causes division by zero, and everything breaks because you can’t divide by zero and have meaningful results. So in order to avoid it, your brain bends its model of reality, starts telling itself fairy tales about the supernatural world, redefines death as “transformation”, and basically bullshits itself into avoiding facing the inevitable.
> Even if we found out complete proof for what actually happens when you die and after death
We have. Your consciousness just shuts down forever. You’re a mortician, you would know. We just can’t grapple with it.
Oh, I know the electricity stops and we shut down like a dead battery but too many humans think that something might happen to the “soul”, and use the excuse that energy can neither be created or destroyed, just transferred. They want to believe in the near death experiences, and have 100% proof that there’s no reincarnation or ghosts or afterlife
If we weren’t fighting about “this” then we would be fighting about “that” and it can be anything at all that we can make up. It’s made up!
You are wrong to think that religion is only about fear. The bigger part for the individual IMO is that it provides comfort.
I think the world would be in a better place if people stopped believing in fairy tales. This includes religion, Santa Claus, and every other useless nonsense.
Religion, specifically, set the world back by 1000-1500 years. Sure would be nice to live in a time when cancer doesn’t run rampant — but nah, let’s let the imaginary fairy grandpa solve everything for centuries.
