All good points, I expect it could even be worse and happen more often without religion.
Or…maybe because the need for a sense of meaning in life and the support of community is hardwired into our brains!
6 million jews would disagree with you.
In some religions you were going to be facing eternal damnation regardless of how you lived your life or who you were. It wasn’t even viewed as a punishment, just the way thigns were. The Mesopotamians believed you’d go to a place where you ate and drank dust, spending your time in the dark. And when Odysseus meets with Achilles in the underworld, Achilles tells him he’d rather be living as a slave to the poorest farmer than be in the underworld. I don’t know if these attitudes empowered those in the lower classes of the Greek or Mesopotamian worlds.
What on Earth is that supposed to mean? Granted, the Nazis built on centuries of religiously based Christian anti-Semitism, but they certainly weren’t Christians themselves. And most Jews are still attached to our own religion, so the implication that the lesson we learned from the Holocaust was “religion, in general, is bad” is clearly wrong.
Absolutely false, a population of people no longer strong enough to stand up for right and wrong is what killed the Jews, not religion. How they got that way I don’t know. I would like to know more about German society then.
Who says the only alternative is knowledge? They could have just sat around the camp fire and said “shit happens whatcha gonna do”. Instead they developed a system that involved supernatural beings with great power, and developed them into a universal belief system. The fact that pretty much every tribe did this suggests that they found it helpful in some way. If for no other reason than silencing the existential angst long enough to get the planting done.
IMHO religion seems to broadly serve three different functions.
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Metaphysics. This aspect is for providing answers to the big questions. Where did we all come from, what happens after we die, and so on.
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Ethics. What are the right and wrong ways to behave?
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Social. Providing a group of like minded individuals for purposes of answering questions in the above two areas, and for general socialization (church dinners and events, etc.).
Science can replace the need for the first aspect of traditional religions, but will never replace the other two. Even in societies that try to get rid of religion (the Soviet Union, present day China and North Korea, and so on) the state will just end up taking over the other two functions and end up being a de facto religion minus the metaphysical mumbo jumbo of pre-scientific societies.
Did you even read the part I was responding to?
So your contention is that if the jews had not been religious they would have worse off!? That makes absolutely no sense.
That is a gross oversimplification, just plain wrong and even if true would not have been averted by religion or Christianity. The Crusaders, for example, killed between 2 and 6 million people. They were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. And there were others.
Not necessarily. The reason could just be that the religious spent thousands of years systematically killing everyone who failed to put on enough of a show of piety. Religion becomes “universal” because those who failed to conform are dead or know to remain silent.
I’m going to put aside the moral and philosophical issues and focus on something different; religion as an organizational framework.
I feel that people, on average, live significantly better in an organized society than in a unorganized one. In order to be an organized society, there has to be some kind of framework to organize around. There are other possible frameworks, even for primitive societies that are just starting to get organized beyond the clan/tribe level. But religion is one that can offer the most to all members of society, even if what it’s offering is illusionary, so it’s the most stable. Religion can tell people “do your part in this life, even if it’s a very lowly role, and you will be rewarded in the next life.”
A society which isn’t offering that promise of a future afterlife reward via religion has to either offer rewards in this life or assume the risk that people will start asking “what’s in it for me?” and opt out of the framework (or seek to overthrow it).
I’m having wifi problems. I posted this several hours ago and apparently it was never sent.
This. Is Communism a religion? Patriotism? Buddhism?
Buddhism does not require any belief in supernatural deities. Many Buddhists do believe in gods and spirits, but it’s not intrinsic to the broader thing called Buddhism.
I agree with this. I think economics drives a lot of “morality”.
Those other things are basically the entire society. Religion in the past wasn’t a separate thing about a person or a state that could be cleanly sivided and put aside at will; they were intrinsic to how the entire society functioned.
Today, we have developed new social constructs, like the value of individual liberty, and we can build our society around that. But when people first started to do that, it was a (heh) Revolutionary concept.
It’s easy for us to look at the social structures that societies in the past had and discount them for being oppressive and unequal. And that’s true. They were. But they also created the conditions where people could sit around and have philisophical debates that led them to reject those old models for society and build the new, more equal ones we live under today (and that lead them to strive to create new models that are even more equal).
Without religion, maybe those older societies would have been more equal to begin with… or maybe they would have been even more brutal and oppressive.
That’s one job religion has. In ancient societies, it wasn’t the most important job, though. Very often the purpose of religion was to answer the questuon, “how should we structure our society?”.
I would argue this is the case for nearly all pre-modern societies.
This entire post is excellent and I’ll highlight this sentence.
Religion, in general, is a set of principles and traditions about how people should live their lives. It’s unavoidable. When a person say “I’m not religious” they mean something like “I don’t attend religious meetings” or “I don’t believe in the supernatural”. But you can be sure that person has ideas about how they should live their own life, based on their own values.
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with magical thinking or supernatural deities. And that’s key.
Sure, societies need a structure that everyone needs to follow to keep things running smoothly. This doesn’t make everyone happy, there are trade-offs, but it’s required to prevent chaos.
The difference between the Catholic church and their values, say, and the Constitution is that religion requires a belief in a magical being. That’s simply not required for a smooth running society.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that. The topic of the thread AIUI is whether it would have been possible for a civilization to advance to the secular/democratic/liberal level without passing through religion on the way.
It’s hard to know what kind of cultures could have arisen in a completely different Human Race which was free of the impulse to religion, according to whichever set of functional definition and characteristics of “religion” you choose.
Which makes it hard to say that religion has had a positive influence on society.