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.
My personal opinion (as a dispassionate atheist) is that religion isn’t the problem with human nature. In the U.S., for instance, we have some Christians who have strayed so far, I don’t get how they’ve even seen a Bible verse. But also, basically every major Civil Rights leader was a Christian preacher or woman of faith. There are similar situations everywhere. There’s Buddhists who are so non-violent they wouldn’t kill a fly and other “Buddhists” who commit genocide, which doesn’t even make fucking sense.
So, my view of religion is that it’s mostly not the thing to focus on. People can be organized for good or evil and there’s plenty of secular things where people define an identity. I suspect if religion never existed, we’d have all the same problems. I mean, we have soccer hooligans and it’s not because people object to 22 people getting some exercise on a lovely afternoon. (Or a miserable, rainy Wednesday night in England.)
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.
What’s the difference between religion and any other belief systems?
Reality?
Lmfao goddamn this is good
Religion is just a tool. A tool is only as good as the person using it.
You’d have to cut out the part of our brain that’s responsible for religious thinking. So what does that do to humanity?
I don’t think Religion created our problems, I think we did. I think Religion is just our brains trying to maintain sanity. We can’t fathom “infinity”, we can’t fathom the times before or after our deaths. I think religion was just created by people who need to attribute something to that, so they can get their minds off of it.
It has been used as a weapon, for sure, but I don’t think there’s any getting rid of it. I think naturally we gravitate towards it due to our need to understand the world around us. When we get to something we can’t wrap our heads around - it’s easy to just explain it away with a story. Others will dive even deeper into understanding it (science and the scientific method)
I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?
It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.
When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?
So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.
Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.
Yes, 100%
You are wrong to think that religion is only about fear. The bigger part for the individual IMO is that it provides comfort.
Yes, but that’s not possible.
It’s tricky to say. Organised religion throughout history has been one of the biggest oppressive machines and cause of untold human life lost. On the flip side, religion has been the source (or at least financer) of an enormous amount of the most highly regarded artistry in our history.
The reason that isn’t an obvious tip of the scale, is that if religion poofed out of existence, I’m almost certain that the oppressive machine would have just taken another form and still caused untold destruction, loss of life, and hatred. But I’m not sure the art would have still thrived as it did.
No, it’s not religion that makes people self-centered assholes that like to kill, rape and pillage. Religion is just a handy excuse to hide behind.
However, structured religion does hold back scientific progress by prohibiting to question the status quo.
Without religion, the world would be pretty much the same, but maybe we would get disintegrated by advanced laser tech instead of being shot with a bullet.
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.
Religion exists because it’s a way to control people you can’t reason with for whatever reason. It’s definitely a net negative now, and has been for centuries imo, but back at the beginning it was an important cornerstone of civilization
If there were no religions I’d figure that human race is one where tribalism can’t catch on as well, in which case there would probably be a lot less organized violence like wars.
Individual crimes are always going to happen with or without religion. Crimes generally have real tangible punishments and there are still criminals. Imaginary punishments aren’t going to do much to stop them.
No - probably not.
Religion, just in and of itself, isn’t really the problem. It’s just the most notable example of the underlying problem, which is probably best summed up as aggressive tribalism.
People have a compulsive desire for self-affirmation - for assurance that they embody whatever qualities they consider the indicators of “good” people. And by far the easiest way for people to assure themselves of that is to associate those qualities with a label and self-apply that label. That gives them a fellowship of label-wearers who are invested in the same belief, which establishes a feedback loop in which they all assure each other of how [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] they are, and a ready-made set of outsiders they can individually and collectively condemn. And that last is the real problem - since few if any people truly embody the qualities they wish to believe they do, the easiest and most effective way to assure themselves they do is to focus on some designated set of others and on the assertion that they fail to possess those qualities. That allows people to assure themselves that they are at least more [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] than these other people over there.
That’s clearly a toxic and antagonistic dynamic that really just serves to divide people up into warring factions, and since it’s at least somewhat irrational yet crucial to people’s self-affirming self-images, it’s a thing that easily gets entrenched and, whenever possible, codified, so that it can be forcibly imposed.
Again, religion is certainly the most common and historically destructive vehicle for that, but it’s far from the only one. Most notably, it’s also the dynamic underlying virtually all ideology and a great deal of philosophy, not to mention a great many less significant distinctions, ranging from sexual preference to diet to sports fandom.
Now - in the first place, I would say that it would not have been possible to have a world without religion, since the practical purpose of religion is to provide answers to questions for which there’s insufficient evidence or knowledge to support nominally legitimate answers, and that lack of evidence and knowledge was an unavoidable part of our history. From the moment that somebody wondered what that big bright thing up in the sky was and somebody else made up an answer for them, religion was inevitable.
Beyond that though - if we were to imagine a world in which religion somehow never came to be, we’d just have had a world in which people would’ve focused that much more on the other ways in which they divide themselves against themselves, since that desire for self-affirmation exists anyway.
And truth be told, I actually think that’s part of the problem with our current world - that a great many people have just shifted from what would in the past been a self-affirming faith in a religion to a self-affirming faith in an ideology or philosophy or political affiliation or some other tribal distinction - that much of what we’re seeing today is the same toxicity just based on more secular divisions.
Not that religion has become less of a problem - what it’s lost in overall market share, it’s undeniably gained in the fervor and aggression of its remaining adherents, but it’s also been joined by a wide range of other divisions, each destructive in the same general ways, even if not necessarily to the same degree.
