I was just trying to restate the OP’s question in a way that wouldn’t be nit-picked insufferably like it has been upstream. It’s about getting at the intent of the OP. I didn’t say it was likely or preferable or possible.
Yeah. I’m an atheist, so, naturally have a tendency to believe things like the above are true. However, when I try to be completely impartial, I recognize that people like Trump are atheists. He’s a disaster of a human being. So, do we really want to say that the world would be a paradise if religious thought went peacefully away?
I’d like to think that would be the case. But, people are people. Some people are just absolutely dead set on being stupid. Given every possible opportunity to be competent, they’ll tweet something utterly insipid about wiretapping and then blame the UK Intelligence services.
Therefore, my assessment, which I hoped was totally objective, that society would be pretty much the same.
Gotta agree with DrForrester. If religion went away, we’d still find reasons to hate each other and fight about it. The other existing causes, such as racism and nationalism would become more important, given the vacuum (so to speak) left when religion disappears.
(Also, people might just fight about who had been right in their religious views, sort of the way we, here, discuss what might have happened if Aaron Burr, not Thomas Jefferson, had won the election. “Oh, yeah? I went to Mass twice a week, so you were just a sham Catholic!”)
(Also, Muslims and Jews would not be in any great haste to eat pork.)
Religion and theology do not necessarily co-exist on the same page, but nearly always do, with theology being the ultimate glue that holds the religion together. There is no selling point to religion, without a claim of consequences for unbelief. Religion, as a carrier of ethics, has value to the social organization of the species.
So, man, as a social animal, needs a cohesion of behavior, codified by a religion, which is enforced by deific threat. This is not proof that there is no God, but only evidence that even a non-existent one would almost certainly be presumed in a functionally successful social order.
Don’t mistake my position for “atheism = good; religion = bad”. I do believe widespread atheism is / would be is an opportunity for societal improvement. But that’s not at all the point of my post.
I agree jerks will continue to exist. I was simply asserting that the preconditions necessary for unanimity, regardless of what philosophy we all agree on, would itself require a change in human nature. Those v2 humans would be different. I posit their biggest difference would be reduced jerkiness.
I may well be wrong in that. But that was what I was saying. Not some simplistic “atheism = good; religion = bad”.