It has no more “will” than a virus does, but viruses demonstrate that “will” isn’t necessary.
Okay, I’ll avoid the tricky question of will. Do you feel that religion has an existence outside of human beliefs? Or even its own distinct existence outside of human existence?
Sort of? It’s a parasite; like the virus I’ve compared it to, it can only be active within a host. Words on a page do nothing without a reader; but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Just as a virus without a host just floats around, a Bible without a believer just sits there; but they still exist as physically separate, information-carrying objects.
So it depends on how you define “distinct existence”; do viruses have such an existence? If they do, then so does religion.
Do you have any evidence for this theory? Once again, do any serious scholars of ancient history agree with this analysis? Or are we meant to take it on (heh) faith?
Not that ‘religion or ideology as an intellectual contagion’ is a bad analogy; for example, if I were a king in the 1700s, I might look at the American and French revolutions as symptoms of a deep and devious intellectual virus known as ‘Liberalism’. But that’s an analogy for the spread of ideas, not an argument that ideas aren’t tools created by humans to accomplish societal tasks.
I don’t feel a Bible is evidence of religion having its distinct existence. A Bible could just be an artifact of human existence. It’s proof that humans existed to write it but it wouldn’t have existed without humans.
That’s not true of a virus. A virus doesn’t need a human to make it exist.
I don’t feel that religion is some independent thing which makes people do things. Religion is something that people do.
Which brings up another point - “virus” and “tool” are not mutually exclusive.
If you toss plague infected corpses from your trebuchet over the enemy’s walls, you are using a bacterium as a tool.
If you inject people with a genetically modified retrovirus, you’re using a tool, whether you’re trying to vaccinate them or unleash a scifi super plague.
I get it - Der Trihs doesn’t like religion so he wants to us negative terms like ‘virus’ to describe it - but just because you think something is harmful to society doesn’t mean it isn’t a tool. Lots of tools have negative side effects - guns, bombs, cars, nuclear reactors, internal combustion engines, high fructose corn syrup, opium.
Insisting that religion isn’t a tool used to organize society because today we have secular tools that do the same job better is like insisting that prehistoric stone hand choppers aren’t tools because we now have stainless steel knives; choppers are only a devious trap for ripping up the skin on the palm of your hands and stubbing your thumbs.
Is there a difference between a tool used to organize society and a tool used to control society?
The second is both subversive and often in opposition to the first. Religion turns people against one another, justifies bigotry and makes them irrational, none of which is good for organizing society.
Especially in a desirable way; I don’t think that the near-universal misogyny of organized religion is a desirable thing even if subjugating women is technically “organizing” society. The same goes with religious civil wars, persecution campaigns, and all the rest; organized or not, they aren’t good things.
So is Monarchy also a “virus”, or can you accept that as a tool of societal control even if it is an obsolete one?
East Asia has done pretty well without it
Without Christianity, but that’s not the only religion, is it?
“Monarchy” is a general concept, religions are specific things. And I’d call it an exploit, a method of hijacking human psychology to grab power and status. “Societal control” is less important than getting to the top of the pyramid and staying there.
“Monarchy” raises an interesting function of religion that I think would be much harder to achieve without religion which is: legitimation of power.
I’m thinking mainly of medieval Europe, but this goes back to the Pharoah who was, of course, a god and/or a manifestation of Osiris, not to mention the Roman emperors discussed above, the Persian rulers blessed by Ahura Mazda, the Mandate of Heaven etc.
To be in power is to invite challenge. “Why should you get to be king?” is an important question to have a good answer to! And there are obviously good answers that are entirely material: “Me and this army”, “Better me than that bastard”, “I am actually quite good at this” etc.
But all of those, because they are grounded in reality, are contingent. What if someone comes along with a bigger army, or people decide they do like that bastard better, or the crops fail two years running? What legitimises a reign then?
Religion, precisely because it lies outside the realm of the material, provides a good - by which I mean effective and practical - answer. Legitimation through divine blessing is really hard to argue with! It provides the ruler with enormous cultural/social power to wield against prospective challengers/usurpers. An unchallengable assertion of right to rule, which is possessed by the monarch but not by the wannabe. This lack of legitimacy deters potential allies, threatens instability for a temporarily successful challenger, and poses a constant question about fitness to rule. Conversely, legitmation makes the throne more secure, acts as a rallying point for the faithful and allows the wielding of power.
Consider how Charlemagne despite being quite clearly de facto Big Man in Western Europe went to some lengths to get the Pope (an almost entirely powerless figure at that time) to anoint him with holy oil. It clearly was of significant benefit to him to get the divine seal of approval, precisely because an inarguable divine authority made his rule that much more stable. Ditto Robert the Bruce pursuing Papal recognition post Bannockburn, or by contrast Edward III’s inability to trade away his claim to be King of France because you can’t barter away divine providence for Bordeaux and Acquitaine.
In a world without religion where there is no such ultimate authority to underwrite one’s claim to power, we are lacking an important mechanism for stability. If it’s not replaced, then the greater threat of challenge means a much higher degree of political instability or that stability being entirely dependent on material concerns, which is an incentive to any monarch for a repressive absolutism which historically has not been great for social/cultural/economic development.
In short (too late), power cannot over anything other than the short term flow simply from having the biggest stick and a divine mandate is as good a way as any to give people a reason to obey your decrees when you’re 200 miles away.
ETA - now we have much better methods of legitimising power, viz. democracy. And that is good. But it took us a long while to get there and it’s not clear that we could short circuit that process.