Suppose you could go back to the first human civilizations and convince people that their gods didn’t want them fighting about who had the best, or the truest gods.
So, no persecution of Jews, no Crusades, no Inquisition, etc. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be wars – just that people would need to find other rationales for fighting them.
I’m also curious as to whether you think this concept of tolerance to very different religious beliefs would over time generalize to tolerance of other distinctions among people and societies. Or maybe we as humans would find (or need) other reasons to discriminate – would there still be race-based slavery today because we would discriminate more by skin color than beliefs?
I really don’t think it’s something that could be hypothesized in less than a 1000+ page book. Since the dawn of our recorded history humans have used deities as an explanation for phenomena and then used those gods to justify their wars, morality, and ideals. To remove that from the equation of humanity is to change humanity and history entirely.
I feel that the world would be a lot better without religious intolerance TODAY, but I can’t even begin to imagine what the world would be like if there had never been any to begin with.
Yeah, this might be true. But I’m not suggesting removing the concept of religion entirely, just the concept of using violence against disbelievers. I think this would still leave the door open for things like capital punishment, and even for many wars fought through history. Just because the leaders wouln’t be running around saying, “God is on our side.” doesn’t mean they couldn’t have come up with a different rationale for launching the war.
I’d think we’d all be Buddhists. Buddhists do have wars of course, but I’ve never heard of them urging their fellow Buddhists to pick up something sharp and pointy and go convert the infidels down the street.
Assuming you really could get everyone to agree to stop hating people of other religions (which I think would be impossible, since even if you could convince the original founders of the religion of that I’d expect that later on some hard-line radical followers would re-interpret the original teachings to justify hate and violence later on down the road), I don’t really think it would change the amount of hatred and persecution overall.
I definitely think that if it weren’t for religious intolerance, then we would have settled on some other justification for hating each other.
I believe that it is a part of human nature for groups/tribes/societies of people to separate into “Us” vs. “Them”. It helps a group’s cohesion to bond over having a common enemy, whether the enemy in question is of another religion, another race, another nation, or just of another political party.
“Okay, then: what do our gods want us to fight about?”
I don’t think you can end fighting by removing any single factor that people fight about (or claim to)—even if you could do such a thing. At least not without making major changes to human nature.
I came in here to say this, so let me add my voice to yours.
You only need to check out all the stupid non-religious violence in the world to see that religion is just another excuse. Removing all intolerance would help, but removing religious intolerance would just change the wording on the war poster.
Religion and war goes hand in hand. As Testy said, I think Buddhism is the only religion that comes to mind that doesn’t have a violent and war filled history. But Buddhism doesn’t even have a proper god, so that definitely has something to do with the lack of a “God is on OUR side” debate.
A civilization without religious wars and religious intolerance would look a lot like China. China has seen very little of the religous warfare and religious persecution that has been endemic further west, in the domains of Christinaity and Islam.
The Chinese Emperors traditionally demanded that they be worshipped as gods, as all good people should worship their parents and their ancestors. Beyond that, their subjects were free to embrace Buddhism or Daoism or Islam, or to worship local deities, however they wished. There has been relatively little large-scale conflict among adherents of the different faiths.
Has China been Happy Land as a result? Not hardly. It has had more than its share of dynastic and civil war, violence, anarchy, and despotism–bookended by Qin Shi Huang and Mao Zedong, each of whom raised democide (the slaughter of one’s own people) to an art form.
So I think a world without religious wars would look the same, except we’d fight over different things.
I recall the ex-“white supremacist” who said his wake-up call came when he asked a colleague, when all non-whites are either eliminated or safely subjugated, then how will they decide supremacy? Then he joked- would we use hair & eye color? His colleague replied quite seriously- Of course.
I think we would have had the World Wide Web 20,000 years ago and would long since have passed the kind of real and everyday achievements that, today, people still think of as godlike.