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.
No. If it wasn’t religion people would be assholes to each other about something else. Religion is just an excuse.
Hasn’t the question been settled by the Beatles? *Imagine no religions, we’d all be in peace ohohoohoho, you may say Iama dreamer. *
But we may still find other reason to fight
Yes, 100%
It’s not possible. Every night people looked at stars, watched the patterns, and made stories about how and why we’re here. It’s completely woven into humanity and every part of culture and art form.
I’m an atheist, and obviously a lot of evil things have been done in the name of religion, but I think there are some incredible things that have resulted from it, too.
People were given solace in times of sorrow. They were given a hope for justice in times of tyranny. The art of the Sistine Chapel, or Buddhist temples, or incredible songs that resonate because of their religious imagery. You wouldn’t have Hallelujah or Spirit in the Sky, and on the other hand you wouldn’t have Imagine - or at least it would hit different. Some addicts rely on it to help them fight addictions.
Some religious traditions helped with sanitation and preventing the spread of disease in a time when we didn’t have other tools to make people understand.
So in the end I think religion has done and continues to do tremendous harm and is mostly an evil force, but there are some incredibly beautiful and important things that came from it that are worth celebrating.
I want to add to this. I’m not a psychologist, but I have heard a couple times about the term “third place”. It’s this concept that most people have a “place where they live”, a “place where they work”, and then a “place where they socialize”. It has been theorized that the modern working-age population is having trouble with stress and mental health in large part due to the dearth of “third places”.
The “third place” can be, for example, a restaurant or bar that you frequent (think the pub from the TV show Cheers), a book club, a sports club, or, crucially, a church or place of worship.
For Christianity at least, knowing that you were going to see and socialize with the same group of people (who share at least 1 major interest in common with you) every Sunday is apparently quite good for mental health. So, although I am no proponent of certain Western religions in general, I do think their decline has contributed to some of the mental health crises. How much? I cannot say.
That’s a really good point. Lemmy has sort of become my Third Space and Reddit before that. I moved away from home for 5 years then moved back and then covid hit. I haven’t had anyone to hang out and socialize with other than my wife and kids in a long time.
I used to be active in the kink community and we’d go to munches, which were really just a bunch of people united by a sort of bohemian stance towards sexuality getting together and talking about mostly anything else. Religion or secularism was mostly irrelevant. I really miss the kink community for that reason more than anything, you know, particularly deviant. But also being transgressive was fun, too.
Online just doesn’t hit the same.
Fun fact, spirit in the sky was made by a Jewish man who just liked the sound of gospel music and didn’t believe any of it. White Christmas is similar, Irving Berlin was also Jewish.
Sometimes creative people just want to make good art and in largely religious societies they can make their art more relatable or consumable by incorporating that religion
Spirit in the Sky goes so hard with that riff. Definitely one of my favorite songs to roll the windows down and drive too fast to. Thanks for the fun fact!
Oh absolutely, it’s such a good one. You put it perfectly, one of my favorite things was listening to it while driving these twisty country roads near my grandparents house when I was younger ( a little faster than I should :P )
Edit: spelling
Even today, I know some people who dedicate themselves to helping their community or open source, in the name of religion. It gives them a zen and feeling of purpose.
I also know people who have no friends or support. They’re locked up in their apartment, letting themselves rot day in and out. If those people were religious, at least they would be going to church.
Atheist btw.
Depends on what you define as a religion. Violently forcing beliefs onto others - yes we would definitely be better off without that. Hierarchical structures of power - also yes.
Trying to explain the universe around us by anthropomorphizing natural phenomena? I’m not so sure. It could be seen as useful in the sense of philosophical exploration.
As inspiration for art - it was immensely useful.
Humans are pretty terrible and we’ll find any excuse to justify our terribleness. One of the parts of the French Revolution was the Dechristianization of France. While this may sound like a good thing, which should lead people to live their lives based on reason, it also led to violence against priests. And the lack of religion did nothing to stop the Reign of Terror. In short, it was less an atheist utopia and more just humans finding different excuses to be terrible to one an other.
Similarly, the Soviet Union was founded on the Marxist principal that “religion is the opiate of the masses”. This meant that the Soviet Union was officially athiest. However, unlike some of the French Revolutionary governments, the USSR largely tolerated religious practices. At the same time, the officially a theist state got up to a lot of horrible stuff.
At the same time, there is an argument to be made that Christianity helped reign in some of the worst excesses of monarchs during the Middle Ages. It’s important to remember that people really believed this stuff. Kings really did think about their immortal soul and what they would be forced to answer for on “judgement day”. Fear is a powerful motivator and it may be that, for all their terrible selfishness, some monarchs may have been led to moderate the worst of it based on that fear.
All that said, I’m not sure how much differently history would have played out, without religion. As I led with, humans are pretty terrible. Many wars may have had a religious veneer, to get the people to go along with them, but they were more often about power, control and ego than religious conviction. Religion provides a convenient excuse to define “the other”. The othering of people creates a permission structure where we will not only tolerate, but often gleefully engage in, truly horrible acts against “the other”. And it doesn’t require religion to do it. Take a look around the Lemmyverse and you’ll find videos of Russian soldiers being blown apart by drone dropped munitions. And the comment sections will be talking about how “they deserve it” or making jokes and light of another human being ripped apart. And these comments will be defended because of the horrible actions of the Russian Government and some Russian soldiers. Russian soldiers have been placed firmly in “the other” and so we can celebrate their horrible deaths, and be cheered on for it in many corners of Lemmy. No religion required.
So ya. I’m not a fan of religion, nor am I religious myself. But, I have no illusions that religion has a lock on people being terrible to each other. It has absolutely been involved in making it happen throughout history. But, I am skeptical of the idea that history without it wouldn’t have been just as filled with humans doing terrible things to each other. Human nature tends towards tribalism and the creation of “in groups” and “out groups”. With those in the former more than willing to do anything and everything to the latter.
It’s pretty naive to think we wouldn’t have just found a different excuse to burn people alive.
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.
Yes
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.
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.
As a life long atheist, the simple answer is no.
The longer answer is:
Humans have a brain that is effectively an extremely good pattern recognition engine, we are wired to find meaning in things, we anthropomorphize everything with no regard for logic or sanity.
Humans are hard coded to make religion or religion adjacent things.
To imagine a world without religion, would mean that we are talking entirely different brain structures, basically we wouldn’t humans anymore.
In saying the above, I think religion has had its time, it has had a good run. It now causes far more problems than it solves. Having a belief system based on an imaginary sky daddy, really doesn’t add much to the modern world.
Side note: why do people anthropomorphize their food, it is really messed up.
Religion hasn’t had its time so much as it is rapidly evolving along with the rest of society.
Religion does not have to mean sky daddy or even have to imply belief in the supernatural.
This right here. If we didn’t have religion, practically the first thing we’d do is begin hallucinating about one. There’s a “religion”-shaped hole in every human brain, basically, even though things that we wouldn’t necessarily readily recognize as religious patterns could come to fill it, wholly or partially. Our pattern recognition/reconstruction and predictive modeling systems will always generate hallucinations that, like most heuristics, are fundamentally not reality but MAY nevertheless offer sufficient utility (or the feeling of utility) that the synaptic connections they comprise will end up self-reinforcing.
The amount of vigilance it would take to continually purge these cognitive patterns would be more expensive and exhausting than most of the potential dangers of letting them exist.
But it’s possible to mindfully decide to cultivate the features and aspects of what emergently congeals there such that it’s more likely to be harmless, such as certain hobbies, fandoms, habits, or ritual-esque behavioral patterns.
Reflecting on our experiences against an anthropomorphized hypothetical observer to gain insights we would otherwise miss shows up even in places like computer programming - see “rubber duck debugging” - sufficiently strict religious sects would most certainly decry this activity as idolatry to a false god, even if YOU clearly do not classify a rubber ducky as a god. Because, again, the root of religiosity is group consensus of a socially shared memetic hallucination. what they perceive becomes a component of their beliefs even if it doesn’t become a component of yours.
This leads me to often consider spirituality, magical thinking, ritualistic behaviors, and religiosity in general as a bridge between our animalistic impulses and instincts vs. our sapience, or whatever you might label “higher” cognitive functions that enable abstract decision differentiation.
