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Timely_Jellyfish_2077 @programming.dev

Do you think the world would have been a better place if there were no religions?

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.

74 comments

  • What I've noticed reading the responses here, is a constant use of the terms non-religious and atheist.

    While they are accurate and the details are on point, I find it interesting that much of the discussion is actually about secularism but no one is using that term.

    Whatever the reasons for this, I think you are all (I'm assuming mostly Americans) missing a trick here. Secularism is woven into the very fabric of American society and is constantly under attack by the religious (mostly) right, especially in recent years.

    As a Brit, we have had to overcome a long history of religious domination and to some extent that continues. The National Secular Society and Humanists UK work tirelessly in this regard.

    I would like to see greater use of the term secular in discourse between and from Americans. I honestly believe that language has a huge effect on ourselves as individuals, and constant use of words that are our goals and that have positive connotations are extremely beneficial to us, and by extension our societies.

    Just my observation, I hope that's ok.

  • 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.

  • 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.

      @TimelyJellyfish2077

      • 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

  • Belief in the divine likely comes from our brains' hyperactive agency detection system: our brains err on the side of seeing agency where there is none in order to keep us alive.

    If a branch snaps behind you and you react as if someone did it but it was really nothing, you're fine. But if it was a human or other animal and you react as if it was nothing, you might be food.

    Property crime is largely a factor of poverty, but also social inequality. If you lack a need you will try to fulfill that need. If you feel like you're unfairly "less-than", you're much more likely to engage in prohibited behavior to correct that. But also if you have power or wealth, your brain becomes less capable of empathy making it much easier for you to criminally hurt others - the rich do most crimes.

    Religion is just using this evolutionarily beneficial flaw in our brains to justify the unjust social hierarchies which drive crime. So in a roundabout way, religion puts upward pressure on crime.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Maybe, if there was a new better-fitting, revolutionary superstructure that would replace it

    I think by its context, religion was the ideology of feudalism and the medieval times' economy (eg. Hinduism)...

    And while it was progressive for its time, when the dawn of a new system came, its weaknesses were exposed...

  • No, because religions are a guide for a person or a group. It is also a compass to detect good and bad. That there are people with bad intentions who misunderstand religion is another issue.

  • 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 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.

  • You don’t need religion to be a moral person, and you don’t have to reject religion to act amorally. But there is no perfect, universal, scientific morality. Cultures, communities, individuals will vary on what they consider a moral act, and morality can change with circumstance. When different moralities interact, there will be conflict. And the amoral (or rather those, who do not subscribe to the same morality as those around them) will always use others’ morality as a tool to manipulate, a curtain to hide behind, a weapon to wield, and a shield to defend with.

    Religion helps communities to build a common morality in order to reduce tensions and foster fellowship within the group. But there will always be communities. There will always be disagreements, confusion, frustration, pride, loyalty, forgetfulness, honor, greed, hunger, struggle, disease, countervailing needs and desires, and mercy. The absence of religion would not stop people from seeking safe harbor and kinship in others, whether that is social clubs, fandoms, sports teams, political parties, activist organizations, etc. And when that kinship is endangered or perceived to be endangered, the absence of religion will not stop people from seeking to obstruct, forestall, eliminate, or revenge against whatever or whomever is perceived to be the cause.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

74 comments