It is more likely that acceptance of ignorance stalls, or even kills, curiosity.
Because it came with the caveat that if you didn’t accept it, you would burn forever in lakes of hell-fire.
Science imposes no such threats.
The things that are hardwired are anthropomorphism and curiosity. Our curiosity drives us to build a model of how the world works, but anthropomorphism forces us to inject an agent into it. We’re not satisfied saying “rains fall in the spring”, we have to say “a sky-man makes it rain in the spring”.
And since the world we seek to understand also includes people, this reinforces the anthropomorphism - you can’t kill your neighbor, or the sky-man will be angry. This is more workable than just saying it’s forbidden, or someone stronger will punish you. Those things are all negotiable, but the sky-man’s disapproval is not.
Could society have emerged without it? I don’t know, but I do know that society has emerged and we no longer need the sky-man anymore. In fact he’s holding us back.
And even among the Abrahamic religions, there’s a case to be made that Judaism doesn’t “require” that belief in the same sense as Christianity or Islam.
If we’re still talking about early primitive religions, I don’t believe that’s true. AFAIK the Christians invented the concept of eternal damnation.
Right. I wasn’t saying you were wrong, but that the situation could be said with positive-connotation words instead of negative ones.
Depending on how one defines “organized religion”, this might be true (I don’t know for sure.) In any case, it’s common enough that it does appear to be in some way built into humans; so it’s probably doing something useful. At least, unless it’s a side effect of something else built into humans.
However, it may be both doing something useful and doing something harmful; and it has a whole lot of different manifestations, some of which are pretty near unrecognizable as religion to many who grew up with some of the others.
Not all gods are presented as being infallible.
Do all known societies have such?
Genuine question, I don’t know. But the answer might depend on what “the power to decide our ultimate fates” is. If it’s just ‘whether you live or die’, plenty of ordinary humans have decided that for other humans.
Was there no sex outside marriage in medieval Europe? No thievery? No murder?
Not only that, but at least some forms of Christianity claim that we’re not virtuous at all, but instead are all essentially sinners.
I’m not sure there is a leader in some Native American religions; but I’m not properly educated in any of them.
I think those are all true, but I think you’re missing one, and I think it’s major:
Providing a framework for the sense of oneness with the universe combined with a sense of awesomeness that many, though not all, people experience.
For the people who do experience this, it’s usually massively important. Many of them feel a need to talk about it. Religion provides a way for them to do so.
That’s Christianity. It isn’t religion in general now; and there’s no evidence that that was part of early religions.
Possibly in some early groups disagreeing with too many others in the group could get you evicted or even killed. But we have no evidence as to whether or in what percentage of groups this happened when the disagreements were about matters of what we’d now call religion.
Indeed. Behavior, yes; belief, no – and most of the behavior only for Jews, not required of anybody else.
More the opposite. It was smothering curiosity by refusing to even consider that there was anything to find out, and just making up an answer. And “a really powerful guy did it” isn’t creative at all.
Without religion I expect humanity would have progressed faster just because it would be willing to acknowledge that something was unknown, and therefore worth investigating.
We have a plenty of good words to describe non-supernatural value systems: Philosophy, ethics, ideology, etc… “Religion” should be reserved for beliefs or values steeped in the supernatural.
The same could be said about games. Games are an integral part of all cultures and are one of the oldest forms of human social interaction. Question: how is being good at complex games like chess useful to humans?
It’s not, it’s an evolutionary byproduct of deductive reasoning that allowed our ancestors to adapt and evolve into our current form. I suspect there is a similar thing going on with religion. It’s not the religion that’s useful, religion is the byproduct.
That’s a very modern, secular-centric view of the world. Premodern people (and plety of people today who didn’t grow up in a secular Western society) simply would not make this distinction between “supernatural” and “natural”.
That’s not to say that premodern religious people were factually correct, or anything like that. Obviously, they were not. But if you want to understand how they thought, and thus, how they might construct societies, it is helpful to look at what they actually believed without projecting our own belief systems.
That’s perhaps “humanism”? I have a friend who is a humanist celebrant. He does weddings and funerals and radio sermons.
And yet, that’s not how we actually use the word “religion”. And the whole idea that religion and state can be separated is a fairly modern idea.
And we have other words to describe a belief in the supernatural. Like, “belief in God”, or perhaps “faith in the supernatural”.
I think religion describes a mental structure that people use to define how the world works and their role in it. Sometimes that includes God(s) or ancestors, but not always.
If you are really asking if society would have been as success without religions like Christianity and Islam, you might want to compare the development of societies in the West with those in other parts of the world, like China.
I don’t get the logic here in the slightest. I wasn’t making any claims about the benevolence or otherwise of the medieval church. I was simply pointing out that they were the only people reading, writing, preserving ancient documents and maintaining Europe-wide communications and culture. That’s undeniable, and the ultimate ‘success’ of European society would not have happened without it. That can all be true despite the medieval church being cruel or exploitative that’s a complete non sequitur.
I really don’t see what sector of society that would exist in our irreligious alternative reality that would have served that purpose after the collapse of our counterfactual Roman empire. Maybe there would be but the obvious outcome to me is Roman culture would have died with the empire, people would have stopped reading and writing Latin and the knowledge would have been lost, just as it had with countless empires before it.
Yeah, that’s not a part of Judaism at all. And i don’t think it was a part of most religions historically, nor of most non-Christian-adjacent religions today.
I suggested that as another possibility in the post that you quoted:
I think our alternative reality would already have diverged so massively from what happened in actuality that there might not have been a Roman empire, or might not have been the equivalent collapse, or might not have been a Latin language; and there might well have been different structures all along for preserving knowledge. The divergence would have had to begin in prehistoric times, after all, and probably quite a way back in them.
That may well be true. But it makes this discussion somewhat pointless if so. If everything from prehistoric times has changed then there is no way you can predict whether it would be better or worse IMO
Well, Rome depended on organized religion, so surely the hypothetical would have it develop differently.
I think Humanism encompasses the idea that humans matter, but Liberalism is the more specific idea that the freedoms of individual humans matter, and while that’s one place you could end up from Humanist first principles, you could also make different conclusions, depending on your assumptions.
I brought up Liberalism in opposition to Communism, but I feel like you could arrive at either from Humanist origins, depending on how much value you place on the individual.
I can’t think of a single pre-modern civilization that didn’t depend on organized religion. Which I would think might point us towards an answer to the OP’s question.
Very, very well put!
Yes, and that tendency of many (not all) humans to feel awe, to feel spiritually moved, is a good explanation for why traditional religions remain popular in a world where we don’t much need the god of the gaps and have secular ways of organizing society. Or from another set of metrics, where individuals don’t need religion for metaphysics, ethics, or socialization.
Just as many people (not all) are moved to sing and dance, i think many people are moved towards religion in various degrees. I agree with those who say it’s party of human nature to invent religion.
Why people have that tendency is an interesting question, but outside the scope of this thread, I’d guess.