No, but I do think that there’s plenty of evil that is motivated by religion and nothing else. I don’t buy that people are going to kill each other over religious differences when there are no such differences; they aren’t going to robotically march over to their neighbors and attack them for no reason whatsoever.
This “humans are the cause of the evil done in the name of religion” argument is a blatantly one sided attempt to excuse religion. It makes the claim that religion has no effect on people whatsoever - as long as the effect is a bad one. When it comes to good however, suddenly religion affects human behavior just fine.
As a raging atheist, I posit that it would probably just about the same.
Sure religion offers excuses to do evil, but that’s man’s gig. Man would still do shitty stuff even if we couldn’t credit Gods for the reason for doing it.
Without religion there would just be different rationalizations for being complete assholes to each other.
Religion gives a alternative to other authoritative structures as such can keep the other authoritative strictures in check from having a monopoly in oppression and corruption. This provides a level of competition which does allow benefits for the people.
I can’t imagine any situation in which removing one more delusional form of indoctrination and group-think from society would be anything but beneficial.
It’s all hypothetical of course and we’re just going to argue in circles here.
There would still be philosophy and ethics, so as far as values go the only difference would be that no school could say to follow a certain set of rules at the pain of being ostracized or worse.
Wars come from differences between certain blocs - reduce the number of blocs and you’d reduce the number of wars a bit. But the American Civil War had nothing to do with religion, so you’d hardly eliminate war. People seem to be ready to kill for their country as to kill for god.
The biggest benefit would be the elimination of a powerful group who has a very good reason to dispute science and logic. Individuals will still be illogical, but I’d hope that for the most part they wouldn’t have access to large networks of pulpits and media outlets.
I think the world would be better without religion, but by no means perfect. War and hatred wouldn’t end, we’d just find some other reason to be at each other’s throats.
Not to say it wouldn’t have its good points, of course.
I would assume better mostly because people’s motivators would be more in line with what they experience in day to day events rather than an effort to please an external source.
In contemporary times you can easily make the argument that secular societies function better than religious ones on most every metric. I don’t know if that is cause or effect though.
If you could make it so Jainism was the only religion, then maybe it would be better to be religious. But the main religions on earth are Abrahamic, I think about 50 are Muslim majority and I’d assume (don’t know the exact stat) that 100-150 or so are Christian majority. The world is better off w/o Abrahamic religions.
I think this question reveals more about the respondents than about the state of things in the world. In short, people are human, they have always been human and they will always be human.
Translation: It isn’t the fault of religion when people do bad things, even when the religion in question specifically tells them to do so. Religion is unique among belief systems in that it only affects human behavior when that effect is a good one; all bad behavior is the fault of the innate evil of humanity, not the perfect goodness of religion.
Its main purpose is to justify destruction, killing and stealing of resources of one group over another.
That doesn’t mean that if religion was dismissed as the destructive superstition that it is, people would not have an internal drive to kill and steal from others. But without religion, and if the example of our existing society’s secular thought, ideals and morals are any example, people whould have a much harder time to justify their actions if they didn’t have the easy crutch of religion, resulting, most likely, in a more morally advanced society.
The way we are now, we still trying to get rid of the mental shackles religion has imposed on societies in the past 2,000 years, the three Abrahamic religions being the worst diseases that ever hit the human race.
To my mind, organized religions based on the supernatural are simply a natural phase in the social evolution of humanity. I assume that, at some point, probably reasonably soon, human society will evolve beyond the necessity of belief in the supernatural.
It is like asking “imagine a world without tribalism”. Sure, I can imagine it, but I cannot imagine getting to here from bands of hunter-gatherers without going through a tribe-chiefdom-early state type of progression. Similarly, I cannot imagine getting to the modern, humanist, atheist and scientific view of society without a past that includes, in its social evolution, something very like organized religion.
We as a society cannot spring into being fully-developed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.
If religions were not so competitive, we could tolerate them better. They are corporate in their desire to get bigger and richer. They go to war with each other.
Their greed and love of growth, has resulted in their acting non religiously many times.At what point doe the contradictions in their teachings and their actions, make them false?
The catholic church can never make up for decades of covering up child abuse by priests. When it came out, they should have shown a firm purpose of amendment and then did the right thing. Instead they covered up and lied. Thousands of kids suffered for that.
Followers should have left the church in droves.
What would replace religion? In the last century we had certain societies replace religion with worship of the state. This led to more devastation in one century that all of the religous wars in history combined. If we replaced religion with someone more benign than nationalism or socialism it could conceivably be better. History has shown that there are plenty of reasons to have wars and kill people without religion.
A world without religion from the begining would mean that all of the learning preserved by the medieval monks would have been lost, all of the vicar scientists of the 19th century would have been lost, most of the great works of art of the renaissance would never have been created, the abolitionist movement would never have existed, the practice of nonviolent resistance would never have started, most of the worlds charities would not exist, the public school system would never have been founded, most of America’s universities would not have been founded, the civil rights era would not have happened, etc. The world would be so profoundly different that it is hard to imagine it.
Perhaps if there were no religion societies wouldn’t be predisposed through centuries of conditioning to accept Great Authority as something to worship. Communism filled a power vacuum that Russian society was trained to accept and need, and I think that if a society isn’t conditioned to worship, they will most likely resist concepts like Communism.
