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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.

sdiown ,

Not really, religion makes rules and people follow them. The point is that, yes, we humans can create “rules”, but the question is who is going to create these rules, who are you going to choose as the rule-maker, and how are you going to make sure that everyone follows this rule because everyone has their own ideas or morals about it? Religion must and will exist. Even today, what we create as “rules” certainly come from religion, or at least are closely linked to it. People and their morals come from religion, there must be some power over people to make these rules. Let me give you an example, I am a human being who forbids eating apples, as another human being, if there is no consequence, why should I obey it? Because according to me or according to my morality there is no harm in eating it. And who is right in this situation? No one. Then who are we supposed to listen to? A power superior to us humans. I hope that answers your questions.

11111one11111 ,

Religion is just a tool. A tool is only as good as the person using it.

hperrin ,

Yes, but not just because of the lack of religions, but the lack of superstition that would require. Basically if everyone believed things based on physical evidence, rather than feelings, the world would be better. But, also, we as a species might not have survived our earliest days.

HootinNHollerin ,

Yes

NigelFrobisher ,

It’s pretty naive to think we wouldn’t have just found a different excuse to burn people alive.

lordnikon , (edited )

i think if we stayed with the idea of God’s representing natural phenomena and being flawed characters vs single deity that is all seeing all powerful and a singular conduit and thus used by ambitious men and women to control the masses be it a pope or televangelist.

As we learned more about the ways of science I think they would have gracefully faded into the background and turned into the fables they are today.

A_Very_Big_Fan ,

We’d certainly be better off in the education/intelligence department if we promoted skepticism and criticized faith or any belief without evidence, but to be fair the word “better” is more broad than that…

fsxylo ,

If there were no religions I’d figure that human race is one where tribalism can’t catch on as well, in which case there would probably be a lot less organized violence like wars.

Individual crimes are always going to happen with or without religion. Crimes generally have real tangible punishments and there are still criminals. Imaginary punishments aren’t going to do much to stop them.

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