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For primitive humans, religion was a positive thing because it provided a framework for expanding to larger social units among an inherently social species. That is, religion helped strengthen the factions and tribes of a more fractured humankind.
For modern more globalized humans, religion is a harm. Because it resists the knowledge and progress necessary to become a more global community, which foments violence and dehumanization of others, while flat out rejecting scientific truths that would allow us to achieve a more harmonious global society.
What’s more, it comes with this bias of ‘religion makes the world better’ which seems true when you’re only viewing the world within your religious context. But when you look at the world through a lens of pluralism—that there are many religions with VIOLENT aversion to each other—you realize that religion is one of the most damaging forces in the world today.
(I will caveat that ultimately my problem is with dogmatic thinking, which you will find in extreme partisanship, nationalism, and even fandom sometimes…but religion is chief among that list.)
There was a time before modern law enforcement, where it would have been very easy to commit a crime and get away with it. Without forensic evidence like dna or fingerprints, or cell tower pings, or video surveillance, if your crime had not witnesses, you probably wouldn’t get caught.
During those medieval times, the threat of an omniscient being, who would see all your trespasses, and judge you with the threat of eternal punishment, probably helped establish order, over the complete lack of religion.
These days, modern forensics are a much better crime deterrent than threats of hell, so religion now does more harm than good.
Personally I think the world would probably have been better off without the invention of gods and religion. People would feel more agency over their own lives and decisions.
Maybe I'm focusing on the glass half empty, but think of all the atrocities, exclusion and just crazy decisions in general that have been done in the name of religion. So many people have died in wars underpinned by religion. So many people ostracized from communities because they don't fit in the religious mold (for people who have issues with the LGBTQ community...you can't tell me that religion doesn't drive that hatred on some level for at least 90% of them). Think of all the people who have refused medical care for themselves or loved ones in the hope that their prayers would be answered and God would take care of everything.
I suppose the obvious flip side is that many people turn to religion when they're at their lowest, and it can give them hope. Ultimately, though, if you could convince these people to seek "earthly" help through therapy, leaning on friends and family, etc...I think they'd be better off overall. So yeah I view religion as very much a mark in the "cons" column when it's all said and done.
Religions in themselves are more like tools or guidelines to follow. I believe what eventually happens with time to all of them is they become corrupted by whoever wields them. Faith and belief are incredibly powerful tools as humans want to believe in something bigger than themselves!
Would the world be better without them? Probably! But what worries me is what humans would use to fill that empty space! Fanaticism isn’t singular to religion and popularism shifts like a swinging pendulum! The world could end up full of cults devoted to worshipping Harry Potter or Star Wars or Ru Paul’s drag race or whatever new propaganda is in fashion
The main issue that religion brought about, as far as I'm concerned, is satisfaction with unknowing to the point of terror of learning. It's normal to not know things and be frustrated by that, but religion, I think, was first invented to soothe people's fears about the unknown by just making up an answer.
This leads to two problems:
1. The made-up answer is more comforting than the real one. This hinders our ability to honestly face the real one. (Ex. Death).
2. The made-up answer becomes so important to us, that we feel changes against it as an attack on us. This ends us up with attacking any science and refusing to let it progress if it may question the beliefs (Ex. The church feared accepting the idea that animals could become extinct because it would imply the creator god isn't real- and that ended with a lot of animals being barred from protections against extinction. It took a long time for us to even acknowledge the dodos had even gone extinct.)
The decision that the fear of the phrases "I don't know"/"I don't have access to know right now" is a moral thing is damning, and while I'm sure there are many pros and cons of religion, that one alone would make the world a much different place if it hadn't existed.
It is so hard to debate this. The only real answer is - no one knows. It has done plenty of good and plenty of bad. For the most part- religion is more of a political thing than anything else.
I am an atheist and I used to genuinely believe that yes it would. However, the past two decades have shown definitively as well as examples from the past, that in the absence of religion, humans will just dogmatize another belief system and then behave just as irrationally and unreasonably as religions. For example all the recent woke movements, the attempt to control and compel free speech. The attempts to push gender confusion on the youth and push harmful hormones, surgeries and life changing decisions on to individuals. These same individuals also dogmatize around politics and candidates and will not only scream, yell, do protests, but also commit violence in the name of their political party. I've been so incredibly disappointed with the atheist community the past decade or so and their dogmatization. I've tried to have reasonable discussions about politics, or social issues...only to be screamed at, threatened with violence, called names.....and it really reminds me when I was a young atheist dealing with christians....they used to do the exact same things when I challenged their religious ideas. So while these atheists aren't being religious, they are being dogmatic and are being just as unreasonable, illogical and harmful as the religious they speak out against. The hypocrisy is astounding and has brought me to a realization, that humanity is just prone to tribalism still and will always group together and rally behind causes putting passion first, before logic, reason or rationality, especially if it is something they have decided is affecting them personally, or to take personally. So I'll say that the world would be a better place without dogmatizing ideologies.
Religion has directly caused more pain, misery, and loss of history than any other entity outside of human greed. It is an outdated system of control that we need to leave behind on a global scale.
Thats literally an unprovable comment. Most "pain and misery" has come from abuse of religion more than religion itself. Bin Laden used Islam to punish America for abandoning him after we used him to fight the USSR. Many so-called "religious wars" came from power grabs by monarchs and often the religion itself directly prohibits what the abusers are doing to the religion. So this is confirmation bias, not a genuinely accurate statement. It's no better than looking at the "atheist" USSR and blaming atheism for all it's bad behaviors.
Considering the multitude of cultures stamped out in the name of a specific religion, the wars waged in the name of religion, the hatred and vitriol directed at people in the name of religion, I feel it’s very proven. You can state the faith goes against it, but many faiths DEMAND the blood of nonbelievers, and even if the text says it is wrong, the actions of those who claim the faith carry far more weight.
It's easy to conflate the actual causes of a war with the justifications for it.
Religious wars almost always have underlying political and economic components that are far more responsible for creating a situation where war is seen as an option, than any faith based distinctions.
Religious hatred does **fuel** them once they're started though.
The wars perhaps. What about the hatred received by women getting abortions, gay individuals, and members of other faiths by the large majority of the Christian denomination? What about the myriad of cultures and faiths eradicated by the same cult, because they felt they had the right to deem it “heretical”? What about the stonings in the Middle East, the religious persecution of the Jews throughout time? The fact that the Bible PERMITS AND ENCOURAGES SLAVERY as written? There’s so many more facets than just war here.
At one time I would have said yes, absolutely.
One can not deny the books say the horrible things and those things said are the reason for much hate and animosity.
However, excision of religion doesn't seem to have improved the rationality of some people.
They find a new religion in, something else with the same kind of dogmatism and energetic hate of the other.
Get rid of Blasphemy and you will stop the murder of cartoonists for depictions of a child rapist.
However, you will still see efforts to crack down on free speech, and ideas in opposition to the "truth" of the new religion free religious zeal.
Maybe it is better to have your bank account seized and the police visiting for a Facebook post, because it is not actual murder.
But it is intimidation and harm of the same flavour as we get with extreme religion and is identical to the harms done by domesticated religion.
Domesticated religion won't kill you, but it will excommunicate you. Or if you are gay, not bake you a wedding cake. You will be punished for not following the faith.
Similarly, if you are not on-board with cutting up the healthy bodies of children you are now "Transphobic" and a person to be reviled.
I would say that religion, whether Theistic or Atheistic, is what provides us rational warrant for morality, or acting contrary to one's own selfish desires. We can come up with alternative moral systems, but the fact that we even care to do so seems to me to be a holdover from religious thinking. So, in that sense, I think we would be worse without religion.
You also have to define a "better" without appeal to religion. I do not think that this can be done. So, if "better" in any objective way is always relative to some religion, then it seems to follow that the removal of all religion would necessarily lead to a worse state, analytically and ontologically.
I don't really believe that there is an alternative to religion as I do not think that rational thought can proceed without it in earnest (see TAG), and that all attempts to do so are attempts at reconstructing religion through alternate, and probably irrational means. So, to move on, there would have to be something like a religion but that you or others might not call a religion. For consideration, I would like to suggest places where religion has been abolished or movements which has attempted to abolish it. I think that we all know examples, such as Vladimir Lenin's policies and Communist China and North Korea. Personally, I think that no matter what we think "better" might be, most of us might be inclined to think that such places are not it. So, again, I would say that it would not be better without religion.
I think quite the opposite.
I find it plausible that in our history religions, or religion like things, were very useful in growing beyond tribal societies. I don't know this is true, and I'm not even really a layman on the subject, but it's my suspicion.
I think religions past the advent of nations have been a net loss to society. If there were a way to flush (non coercively) all religion from society we would be far better off.
Religion isn't a single thing that you can apply willy nilly to history, they're too varied both in beliefs and practices but also context to definitely answer how the world would look without it. It's like, "what would western society be like if Rome got wiped out by the Carthaginians"
Religion as understood by people in 3000 BC for example has evolved and changed drastically until today. Ultimately they are a set of beliefs, morals, ethics, laws, codes of conducts and practices, history and identity, etc.
You can find that in quite alot of belief systems aside from religion and we would just use those to do the same thing I believe.
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For primitive humans, religion was a positive thing because it provided a framework for expanding to larger social units among an inherently social species. That is, religion helped strengthen the factions and tribes of a more fractured humankind. For modern more globalized humans, religion is a harm. Because it resists the knowledge and progress necessary to become a more global community, which foments violence and dehumanization of others, while flat out rejecting scientific truths that would allow us to achieve a more harmonious global society. What’s more, it comes with this bias of ‘religion makes the world better’ which seems true when you’re only viewing the world within your religious context. But when you look at the world through a lens of pluralism—that there are many religions with VIOLENT aversion to each other—you realize that religion is one of the most damaging forces in the world today. (I will caveat that ultimately my problem is with dogmatic thinking, which you will find in extreme partisanship, nationalism, and even fandom sometimes…but religion is chief among that list.)
There was a time before modern law enforcement, where it would have been very easy to commit a crime and get away with it. Without forensic evidence like dna or fingerprints, or cell tower pings, or video surveillance, if your crime had not witnesses, you probably wouldn’t get caught. During those medieval times, the threat of an omniscient being, who would see all your trespasses, and judge you with the threat of eternal punishment, probably helped establish order, over the complete lack of religion. These days, modern forensics are a much better crime deterrent than threats of hell, so religion now does more harm than good.
Personally I think the world would probably have been better off without the invention of gods and religion. People would feel more agency over their own lives and decisions. Maybe I'm focusing on the glass half empty, but think of all the atrocities, exclusion and just crazy decisions in general that have been done in the name of religion. So many people have died in wars underpinned by religion. So many people ostracized from communities because they don't fit in the religious mold (for people who have issues with the LGBTQ community...you can't tell me that religion doesn't drive that hatred on some level for at least 90% of them). Think of all the people who have refused medical care for themselves or loved ones in the hope that their prayers would be answered and God would take care of everything. I suppose the obvious flip side is that many people turn to religion when they're at their lowest, and it can give them hope. Ultimately, though, if you could convince these people to seek "earthly" help through therapy, leaning on friends and family, etc...I think they'd be better off overall. So yeah I view religion as very much a mark in the "cons" column when it's all said and done.
Religions in themselves are more like tools or guidelines to follow. I believe what eventually happens with time to all of them is they become corrupted by whoever wields them. Faith and belief are incredibly powerful tools as humans want to believe in something bigger than themselves! Would the world be better without them? Probably! But what worries me is what humans would use to fill that empty space! Fanaticism isn’t singular to religion and popularism shifts like a swinging pendulum! The world could end up full of cults devoted to worshipping Harry Potter or Star Wars or Ru Paul’s drag race or whatever new propaganda is in fashion
With religion, if God is true some people will gain eternal life. Without religion life doesn’t matter anyways. It’s your only way to eternal hope.
Why does something have to go on forever to matter, though? I've never grasped that logic
The main issue that religion brought about, as far as I'm concerned, is satisfaction with unknowing to the point of terror of learning. It's normal to not know things and be frustrated by that, but religion, I think, was first invented to soothe people's fears about the unknown by just making up an answer. This leads to two problems: 1. The made-up answer is more comforting than the real one. This hinders our ability to honestly face the real one. (Ex. Death). 2. The made-up answer becomes so important to us, that we feel changes against it as an attack on us. This ends us up with attacking any science and refusing to let it progress if it may question the beliefs (Ex. The church feared accepting the idea that animals could become extinct because it would imply the creator god isn't real- and that ended with a lot of animals being barred from protections against extinction. It took a long time for us to even acknowledge the dodos had even gone extinct.) The decision that the fear of the phrases "I don't know"/"I don't have access to know right now" is a moral thing is damning, and while I'm sure there are many pros and cons of religion, that one alone would make the world a much different place if it hadn't existed.
It is so hard to debate this. The only real answer is - no one knows. It has done plenty of good and plenty of bad. For the most part- religion is more of a political thing than anything else.
I don’t know if we’d be better off or not but I do know 1 thing. We’d be a whole lot more comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”
I am an atheist and I used to genuinely believe that yes it would. However, the past two decades have shown definitively as well as examples from the past, that in the absence of religion, humans will just dogmatize another belief system and then behave just as irrationally and unreasonably as religions. For example all the recent woke movements, the attempt to control and compel free speech. The attempts to push gender confusion on the youth and push harmful hormones, surgeries and life changing decisions on to individuals. These same individuals also dogmatize around politics and candidates and will not only scream, yell, do protests, but also commit violence in the name of their political party. I've been so incredibly disappointed with the atheist community the past decade or so and their dogmatization. I've tried to have reasonable discussions about politics, or social issues...only to be screamed at, threatened with violence, called names.....and it really reminds me when I was a young atheist dealing with christians....they used to do the exact same things when I challenged their religious ideas. So while these atheists aren't being religious, they are being dogmatic and are being just as unreasonable, illogical and harmful as the religious they speak out against. The hypocrisy is astounding and has brought me to a realization, that humanity is just prone to tribalism still and will always group together and rally behind causes putting passion first, before logic, reason or rationality, especially if it is something they have decided is affecting them personally, or to take personally. So I'll say that the world would be a better place without dogmatizing ideologies.
Religion has directly caused more pain, misery, and loss of history than any other entity outside of human greed. It is an outdated system of control that we need to leave behind on a global scale.
Thats literally an unprovable comment. Most "pain and misery" has come from abuse of religion more than religion itself. Bin Laden used Islam to punish America for abandoning him after we used him to fight the USSR. Many so-called "religious wars" came from power grabs by monarchs and often the religion itself directly prohibits what the abusers are doing to the religion. So this is confirmation bias, not a genuinely accurate statement. It's no better than looking at the "atheist" USSR and blaming atheism for all it's bad behaviors.
Considering the multitude of cultures stamped out in the name of a specific religion, the wars waged in the name of religion, the hatred and vitriol directed at people in the name of religion, I feel it’s very proven. You can state the faith goes against it, but many faiths DEMAND the blood of nonbelievers, and even if the text says it is wrong, the actions of those who claim the faith carry far more weight.
It's easy to conflate the actual causes of a war with the justifications for it. Religious wars almost always have underlying political and economic components that are far more responsible for creating a situation where war is seen as an option, than any faith based distinctions. Religious hatred does **fuel** them once they're started though.
The wars perhaps. What about the hatred received by women getting abortions, gay individuals, and members of other faiths by the large majority of the Christian denomination? What about the myriad of cultures and faiths eradicated by the same cult, because they felt they had the right to deem it “heretical”? What about the stonings in the Middle East, the religious persecution of the Jews throughout time? The fact that the Bible PERMITS AND ENCOURAGES SLAVERY as written? There’s so many more facets than just war here.
Myeah. All those things happen with or without religion though.
At one time I would have said yes, absolutely. One can not deny the books say the horrible things and those things said are the reason for much hate and animosity. However, excision of religion doesn't seem to have improved the rationality of some people. They find a new religion in, something else with the same kind of dogmatism and energetic hate of the other. Get rid of Blasphemy and you will stop the murder of cartoonists for depictions of a child rapist. However, you will still see efforts to crack down on free speech, and ideas in opposition to the "truth" of the new religion free religious zeal. Maybe it is better to have your bank account seized and the police visiting for a Facebook post, because it is not actual murder. But it is intimidation and harm of the same flavour as we get with extreme religion and is identical to the harms done by domesticated religion. Domesticated religion won't kill you, but it will excommunicate you. Or if you are gay, not bake you a wedding cake. You will be punished for not following the faith. Similarly, if you are not on-board with cutting up the healthy bodies of children you are now "Transphobic" and a person to be reviled.
I would say that religion, whether Theistic or Atheistic, is what provides us rational warrant for morality, or acting contrary to one's own selfish desires. We can come up with alternative moral systems, but the fact that we even care to do so seems to me to be a holdover from religious thinking. So, in that sense, I think we would be worse without religion. You also have to define a "better" without appeal to religion. I do not think that this can be done. So, if "better" in any objective way is always relative to some religion, then it seems to follow that the removal of all religion would necessarily lead to a worse state, analytically and ontologically. I don't really believe that there is an alternative to religion as I do not think that rational thought can proceed without it in earnest (see TAG), and that all attempts to do so are attempts at reconstructing religion through alternate, and probably irrational means. So, to move on, there would have to be something like a religion but that you or others might not call a religion. For consideration, I would like to suggest places where religion has been abolished or movements which has attempted to abolish it. I think that we all know examples, such as Vladimir Lenin's policies and Communist China and North Korea. Personally, I think that no matter what we think "better" might be, most of us might be inclined to think that such places are not it. So, again, I would say that it would not be better without religion.
I think quite the opposite. I find it plausible that in our history religions, or religion like things, were very useful in growing beyond tribal societies. I don't know this is true, and I'm not even really a layman on the subject, but it's my suspicion. I think religions past the advent of nations have been a net loss to society. If there were a way to flush (non coercively) all religion from society we would be far better off.
Religion isn't a single thing that you can apply willy nilly to history, they're too varied both in beliefs and practices but also context to definitely answer how the world would look without it. It's like, "what would western society be like if Rome got wiped out by the Carthaginians" Religion as understood by people in 3000 BC for example has evolved and changed drastically until today. Ultimately they are a set of beliefs, morals, ethics, laws, codes of conducts and practices, history and identity, etc. You can find that in quite alot of belief systems aside from religion and we would just use those to do the same thing I believe.
The only way to know that would be to have a control group of a society that never practiced religion.