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Do you think the world would have been a better place if there were no religions?

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.

BearOfaTime ,

What’s the difference between religion and any other belief systems?

MonkRome ,

Reality?

motor_spirit ,

Lmfao goddamn this is good

BearOfaTime ,

You’d have to cut out the part of our brain that’s responsible for religious thinking. So what does that do to humanity?

Vaggumon ,
@Vaggumon@lemm.ee avatar

Faith and Religion are two different things. Yes, I think the world would be far better without Religion. But faith gives people strength to overcome challenges that otherwise may destroy them. Faith doesn’t require you pay anything, money, time, etc into it. Faith is a personal thing between that one person and whatever they happen to put the faith into. Faith doesn’t require you to kill someone else because they don’t share that faith. Faith doesn’t require you study some fairy tale written by storytellers thousands of years ago. Religion is the opposite of all that, and for it’s survival requires you to spread the virus by any means necessary.

illi ,

You really nailed it. I’ll take it one step further though - religion as a concept is not the problem. Having gods, holidays rites and rituals - that’s all good.

It’s religion as an organization, when it gives people power which they can misuse when we start having problems.

Your way of saying it is way clearer though.

Damage , (edited )

Power-hungry people need to make up rules to control others, religions are a convenient tool for that, but they’re not the only one.

PiJiNWiNg ,

I feel the need to disagree with you a bit here. The belief in a god or higher power can drive people to do terrible things, regardless of any form of organization or power structure.

Though I would also argue that the concepts of “religion” and “organization” cannot be separated. To be considered a religion, one would expect an organized set of doctrines, values, etc., likely taught by a spiritual leader or practitioner. The heirarchy of student and teacher is intrinsic to religion. The enlightened, and the lost.

Further, faith/religion based views on the world are, in my view, inherently “unscientific”. If you already feel you have the answers to lifes big questions, what motivation is there to continue research? Or even worse, could they end up wasting resources on religious pursuits.

Anyway, just my 2c.

scytale ,

Even without religion exising, I think people will still eventually gravitate towards something similar. It’s a part of human nature that we are still yet to break away from as a species. Sure, atheism and agnosticism are becoming increasingly prevalent now; but it’s still a very small minority globally and it will probably never become the norm.

Kwakigra ,

I think when people are afraid and confused they tend to depend on narcissistic psychopaths to do their thinking for them. That’s the part that’s nature. The reason so many people are afraid and confused is because we are trying to live in a highly unnatural way in a world guided primarily by narcissistic psychopaths whose only concern is to outdo the other narcissistic psychopaths in the world using their people as a resource toward that end. Religion is one of uncountable tools in this dynamic. Removing it would disempower some narcissistic psychopaths and create opportunities for other narcissistic psychopaths. Afraid and confused people want the assurance from the narcissistic psychopaths regardless of whether religion is an option.

balderdash9 ,

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.

Removing the word religion from this excerpt wouldn’t remove any of these problems. We would still squabble over territory, resources, and ideological differences. To give a non-religious analogy: if a time traveler went back and killed Hitler, Germany would still retain all the problems from WW1 and the Weimar Republic that were ripe for a dictatorship.

BearOfaTime ,

Indeed.

The primal element of Christianity is that we’re all born imperfect. (I like to say we’re thrust, painfully, from perfect security in the womb into a harsh environment where we’re utterly ignorant and dependent upon “others” which we can’t even comprehend).

If we were born perfect, from where would the problems of the world originate?

kitnaht ,

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)

Rottcodd ,

No - probably not.

Religion, just in and of itself, isn’t really the problem. It’s just the most notable example of the underlying problem, which is probably best summed up as aggressive tribalism.

People have a compulsive desire for self-affirmation - for assurance that they embody whatever qualities they consider the indicators of “good” people. And by far the easiest way for people to assure themselves of that is to associate those qualities with a label and self-apply that label. That gives them a fellowship of label-wearers who are invested in the same belief, which establishes a feedback loop in which they all assure each other of how [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] they are, and a ready-made set of outsiders they can individually and collectively condemn. And that last is the real problem - since few if any people truly embody the qualities they wish to believe they do, the easiest and most effective way to assure themselves they do is to focus on some designated set of others and on the assertion that they fail to possess those qualities. That allows people to assure themselves that they are at least more [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] than these other people over there.

That’s clearly a toxic and antagonistic dynamic that really just serves to divide people up into warring factions, and since it’s at least somewhat irrational yet crucial to people’s self-affirming self-images, it’s a thing that easily gets entrenched and, whenever possible, codified, so that it can be forcibly imposed.

Again, religion is certainly the most common and historically destructive vehicle for that, but it’s far from the only one. Most notably, it’s also the dynamic underlying virtually all ideology and a great deal of philosophy, not to mention a great many less significant distinctions, ranging from sexual preference to diet to sports fandom.

Now - in the first place, I would say that it would not have been possible to have a world without religion, since the practical purpose of religion is to provide answers to questions for which there’s insufficient evidence or knowledge to support nominally legitimate answers, and that lack of evidence and knowledge was an unavoidable part of our history. From the moment that somebody wondered what that big bright thing up in the sky was and somebody else made up an answer for them, religion was inevitable.

Beyond that though - if we were to imagine a world in which religion somehow never came to be, we’d just have had a world in which people would’ve focused that much more on the other ways in which they divide themselves against themselves, since that desire for self-affirmation exists anyway.

And truth be told, I actually think that’s part of the problem with our current world - that a great many people have just shifted from what would in the past been a self-affirming faith in a religion to a self-affirming faith in an ideology or philosophy or political affiliation or some other tribal distinction - that much of what we’re seeing today is the same toxicity just based on more secular divisions.

Not that religion has become less of a problem - what it’s lost in overall market share, it’s undeniably gained in the fervor and aggression of its remaining adherents, but it’s also been joined by a wide range of other divisions, each destructive in the same general ways, even if not necessarily to the same degree.

stewie3128 ,

Yes, but that’s not possible.

alexc ,

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…

Infynis ,

Religion exists because it’s a way to control people you can’t reason with for whatever reason. It’s definitely a net negative now, and has been for centuries imo, but back at the beginning it was an important cornerstone of civilization

Karyoplasma ,

No, it’s not religion that makes people self-centered assholes that like to kill, rape and pillage. Religion is just a handy excuse to hide behind.

However, structured religion does hold back scientific progress by prohibiting to question the status quo.

Without religion, the world would be pretty much the same, but maybe we would get disintegrated by advanced laser tech instead of being shot with a bullet.

sylver_dragon ,

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.

kubica ,

What I would want is that some people wouldn't try to bend religion to their will. But anyway what are religions but something that has been shaped over time by people... Sigh, whatever.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

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.

flamingo_pinyata ,

Depends on what you define as a religion. Violently forcing beliefs onto others - yes we would definitely be better off without that. Hierarchical structures of power - also yes.

Trying to explain the universe around us by anthropomorphizing natural phenomena? I’m not so sure. It could be seen as useful in the sense of philosophical exploration.

As inspiration for art - it was immensely useful.

MajorHavoc ,

Trying to explain the universe around us by anthropomorphizing natural phenomena? I’m not so sure. It could be seen as useful in the sense of philosophical exploration.

Yeah. A lot of religions’ explanations for things are only wrong in the sense that Newton’s Laws are wrong. Later physicists made drastic improvements. Einstein’s equations are strictly more correct, and don’t fail in the situations where Newton’s equations fail (near the speed of light).

But Newton’s work was a way to start understanding, and a set of ideas for Einstein to start from. We don’t despise Newton for those failures, we celebrate the incremental progress.

Lots of religion’s efforts to explain the world act like that, just from before we even had scientic methods.

Edit; And to be clear, I still have no respect for the charred remains of any hard-line Newton fans who attempt space travel without applying newer equations.

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