I’m having conflicting thoughts about religion in shaping human history.
As an atheist, it seems obvious to me that if there were no religion from the start, the world would have been a better place than it is now. There would be no religious wars, honor killings, more freedom, no religious leaders abusing their powers, no waste of labor and money on religious things, etc. It may seem that we would be more educated and have better understanding.
My whole conflict arises from the fact that “fear is a better driver than education and reasoning.” As no system is efficient and perfect, the absence of religion would have caused more crimes. Religion promotes fear (the concept of an afterlife, hell) if you do something wrong. If there were no religion, humans may have committed numerous crimes without fearing consequences. You could say that it is due to religions that numerous wars have happened in history. But that is a tiny percentage of the whole population. Most people lived happier with religion as it introduced morals ,ethics and consequences for wrongdoing(big factor). One would think and question before doing something wrong.
You could also say that if we were non-religious from the start, we would have had better education, reasoning, different type ethics and morals etc. But as I said earlier, no system is efficient, and since non-religion doesn’t promote fear if you don’t get caught by others, there would be more crimes without fearing consequences if they don’t get caught by others, which was easy in the old days.
So, I’m thinking if religion did better in the early days.
And I know that nowadays it’s a different story, and non-religion is obviously better.
It’s not possible. Every night people looked at stars, watched the patterns, and made stories about how and why we’re here. It’s completely woven into humanity and every part of culture and art form.
I’m an atheist, and obviously a lot of evil things have been done in the name of religion, but I think there are some incredible things that have resulted from it, too.
People were given solace in times of sorrow. They were given a hope for justice in times of tyranny. The art of the Sistine Chapel, or Buddhist temples, or incredible songs that resonate because of their religious imagery. You wouldn’t have Hallelujah or Spirit in the Sky, and on the other hand you wouldn’t have Imagine - or at least it would hit different. Some addicts rely on it to help them fight addictions.
Some religious traditions helped with sanitation and preventing the spread of disease in a time when we didn’t have other tools to make people understand.
So in the end I think religion has done and continues to do tremendous harm and is mostly an evil force, but there are some incredibly beautiful and important things that came from it that are worth celebrating.
As long as there’s an unequal distribution of power there’s going to be humans who are going to abuse it. If they don’t use god as an excuse they’ll use the glory of the nation or numbers on a spreadsheet
Yes, agreed. Wondering and being amazed by what we don’t know isn’t the issue. The issue is the guy that says he knows, and that you need to follow his organized religion to keep you from perma-death.
As an atheist, I think it was necessary for human development.
Fear is an extremely motivating force, and without the threat of a “hell” for disobeying/ hurting society, it wouldn’t motivate people to cooperate. Additionally without the allure of heaven, it wouldn’t motivate people to work harder, together.
Without instruments of science, the world is would be a complete mystery. Religion existed to give it history and meaning, to give people a place and meaning in life. It feels much more comforting to believe you are the beloved child of a greater being, crafting you by hand, instead of an insignificant creature on a wet rock floating endlessly in the void.
Today I think it is obsolete to an extent, as science has taken the latter role (understanding), and one should not need to be threatened with eternal damnation to stop being malicious. Today religion is now more frequently used for means of brainwash and control rather than betterment of society, which is why I decide not to partake in it.
I’m a mortician/postmortem scientist, who used to run the WSU Funeral History Museum. Based on my research, I don’t think humans could exist without some type of religion/code/customs. As long as there has been death, even in ancient/prehistoric times, humans have been doing specific procedures, to say goodbye to their fallen loved ones.
There’s writings in almost every culture that teach us about what these civilizations believed, and some are beautiful, while others are kindof terrifying, but it all wrapped around people trying to cope with death.
Even if we found out complete proof for what actually happens when you die and after death, some people are still going to prefer their religion’s ideas because it brings them more peace. Death seems to be the clinch pin for all religions, and I honestly don’t think we’d have religion, if we didn’t understand the concept of death. People just want something to believe in.
Now, the garbage parts of religion are created by people seeking power, money, and control, and as long as there’s those who desire to conquer others, religion will be made up and used as a scapegoat, as to why certain people deserve power.
Yes, 100%
I don’t think Religion created our problems, I think we did. I think Religion is just our brains trying to maintain sanity. We can’t fathom “infinity”, we can’t fathom the times before or after our deaths. I think religion was just created by people who need to attribute something to that, so they can get their minds off of it.
It has been used as a weapon, for sure, but I don’t think there’s any getting rid of it. I think naturally we gravitate towards it due to our need to understand the world around us. When we get to something we can’t wrap our heads around - it’s easy to just explain it away with a story. Others will dive even deeper into understanding it (science and the scientific method)
I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?
It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.
When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?
So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.
Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.
Yes. At the very least we might be more honest about why we keep slaughtering each other.
Even today, I know some people who dedicate themselves to helping their community or open source, in the name of religion. It gives them a zen and feeling of purpose.
I also know people who have no friends or support. They’re locked up in their apartment, letting themselves rot day in and out. If those people were religious, at least they would be going to church.
Atheist btw.
I’m not too sure being non-religious from the start would lead to better education. Seems to me that religion was quite a big driver behind early education. You’ll also have some trouble separating history religion and science at that point, people told each other stories about things that happened or how they thought things worked. Some of those stories are rather more fantastical than they needed to be, but how would you tell if there’s nothing to kickstart intellectual discourse in the first place?
And the whole religion stops crime through fear idea seems overly simplistic. It’s the same reasoning that bigger sentences would lower crime, and so far that hasn’t worked terribly well.
Maybe, if there was a new better-fitting, revolutionary superstructure that would replace it
I think by its context, religion was the ideology of feudalism and the medieval times’ economy (eg. Hinduism)…
And while it was progressive for its time, when the dawn of a new system came, its weaknesses were exposed…
Yes
Humans are pretty terrible and we’ll find any excuse to justify our terribleness. One of the parts of the French Revolution was the Dechristianization of France. While this may sound like a good thing, which should lead people to live their lives based on reason, it also led to violence against priests. And the lack of religion did nothing to stop the Reign of Terror. In short, it was less an atheist utopia and more just humans finding different excuses to be terrible to one an other.
Similarly, the Soviet Union was founded on the Marxist principal that “religion is the opiate of the masses”. This meant that the Soviet Union was officially athiest. However, unlike some of the French Revolutionary governments, the USSR largely tolerated religious practices. At the same time, the officially a theist state got up to a lot of horrible stuff.
At the same time, there is an argument to be made that Christianity helped reign in some of the worst excesses of monarchs during the Middle Ages. It’s important to remember that people really believed this stuff. Kings really did think about their immortal soul and what they would be forced to answer for on “judgement day”. Fear is a powerful motivator and it may be that, for all their terrible selfishness, some monarchs may have been led to moderate the worst of it based on that fear.
All that said, I’m not sure how much differently history would have played out, without religion. As I led with, humans are pretty terrible. Many wars may have had a religious veneer, to get the people to go along with them, but they were more often about power, control and ego than religious conviction. Religion provides a convenient excuse to define “the other”. The othering of people creates a permission structure where we will not only tolerate, but often gleefully engage in, truly horrible acts against “the other”. And it doesn’t require religion to do it. Take a look around the Lemmyverse and you’ll find videos of Russian soldiers being blown apart by drone dropped munitions. And the comment sections will be talking about how “they deserve it” or making jokes and light of another human being ripped apart. And these comments will be defended because of the horrible actions of the Russian Government and some Russian soldiers. Russian soldiers have been placed firmly in “the other” and so we can celebrate their horrible deaths, and be cheered on for it in many corners of Lemmy. No religion required.
So ya. I’m not a fan of religion, nor am I religious myself. But, I have no illusions that religion has a lock on people being terrible to each other. It has absolutely been involved in making it happen throughout history. But, I am skeptical of the idea that history without it wouldn’t have been just as filled with humans doing terrible things to each other. Human nature tends towards tribalism and the creation of “in groups” and “out groups”. With those in the former more than willing to do anything and everything to the latter.
The answer (to me) is a resounding yes. I firmly believe that belief in the Supernatural is in-built into all of us. It’s an off-shoot of us being incredibly good at pattern matching combined with our need for parental guidance for so long and a fear of death -
To get past this, we need two things: A personal willingness to ask questions and follow the answers (which is a basic description of science) and we need a society that is willing to embrace these individuals.
That we aren’t quite there yet means we end up with leaders embracing religion, which is reinforced by the masses accepting their dogma. The whole thing about “religion creating morality” is BS and just another form of dogma.
It may be entirely simplistic, and it probably puts too much faith in human capacity, but I think we could move in that direction if we just prioritized learning and inquisitiveness. Note, this is not the same as making people go to college. Learning is a life skill…
No, because religions are a guide for a person or a group. It is also a compass to detect good and bad. That there are people with bad intentions who misunderstand religion is another issue.
