I was watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris discuss religion and one of the questions raised was whether, if they could, they would make all religions vanish with a click of the fingers. Hitchens is the only one who says he wouldn’t. His argument, as far as I can make out, seems to be that he likes having someone to argue with.
Anyway I did a search and it doesn’t seem like this question has been asked before so here it is, with a poll. We’re talking the disappearance of all religions, memories and artifacts etc so we’re forced to start afresh.
No. As distasteful as I find religion, I think it arose to fulfill certain human needs. Religions would therefore reappear in short order, but without the thousands of years they’ve had to evolve into something not completely insane. Imagine if every current religious person instead belonged to an outright cult like Scientology–that’s what I foresee a reboot would look like. Humanity needs to leave religion on its own if the change is going to stick.
On the whole, I don’t think I would. A large part of that is humility. I’m not religious but that’s my choice. I don’t feel I should impose my choice on everyone else.
Beyond that, I can see many people do take solace from religion. Even if I feel that’s false solace, I would hesitate to take it away.
As for the negative effects of religion, I won’t deny they exist. But I question whether those negative effects would disappear with religion. More likely, people that are currently fighting over their religions would just switch to fighting over some other issue like ethnicity or ideology.
Unfortunately, eliminating the need for humans to have to answer to a higher power in order to do the right thing would also have to be part of the finger click. There are an alarming number of people out there who just can’t do the right thing without the threat of going to hell and burning for an eternity if they don’t.
So my answer would be yes if all the underlying reasons for religion developing in the first place also disappear. The answer is no if religion just went poof but with no fixing the magical thinking behind it - as Dr. above states, something similar would just take its place.
I would say the opposite. The beliefs are no weirder, but the mind control that they (and other cults) impose on members is far worse than older religions. It is much more difficult to leave a cult than other religions. In part this is is because cults need to retain strong membership to survive, while large religions are more comfortable in their existence and don’t have to try so hard.
For instance, it’s easy to see the trajectory Mormonism is taking, starting with a clear cult and progressing to the present day as almost-not-a-cult. In another couple of centuries it will seem totally normal.
I would, as part of fighting ignorance. You can acknowledge some benefits of religion for some, but you can’t deny it’s all based on a falsehood (or many falsehoods). So even if the world would not be any better without religion, at least it would be more honest. (By religion, I mean a “god based” belief system. If your religion is community, fellowship and roses, that’s a different matter)
To be honest, I voted yes but I reckon we’d be worshipping the sun within a week.
As regards keeping people sane and giving solace - if religion had never existed so people didn’t know about it then wouldn’t they just find solace and sanity in other things? They wouldn’t miss religion because they never had it.
Yes, but only if we could replace religion with the complete works of Dr Seuss as the reported source of society’s morals and ethics.
However, you can rest assured, within a week people would be practicing strange dietary restrictions because of Green Eggs and Ham; teaching the Tweetle Beetle Battle as history, and using The Lorax to justify instituting a carbon credit tax.
Yes. I think people trying to find some sort if spiritual center on their own would be a million times better than following codified dogma that can hurt entire groups of people, mostly disenfranchised in some way.
Probably, but I think there’s a max-out effect. If two people have five other reasons to want to kill each other, what practical difference is removing a sixth reason going to have?
