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.
As a life long atheist, the simple answer is no.
The longer answer is:
Humans have a brain that is effectively an extremely good pattern recognition engine, we are wired to find meaning in things, we anthropomorphize everything with no regard for logic or sanity.
Humans are hard coded to make religion or religion adjacent things.
To imagine a world without religion, would mean that we are talking entirely different brain structures, basically we wouldn’t humans anymore.
In saying the above, I think religion has had its time, it has had a good run. It now causes far more problems than it solves. Having a belief system based on an imaginary sky daddy, really doesn’t add much to the modern world.
Side note: why do people anthropomorphize their food, it is really messed up.
This right here. If we didn’t have religion, practically the first thing we’d do is begin hallucinating about one. There’s a “religion”-shaped hole in every human brain, basically, even though things that we wouldn’t necessarily readily recognize as religious patterns could come to fill it, wholly or partially. Our pattern recognition/reconstruction and predictive modeling systems will always generate hallucinations that, like most heuristics, are fundamentally not reality but MAY nevertheless offer sufficient utility (or the feeling of utility) that the synaptic connections they comprise will end up self-reinforcing.
The amount of vigilance it would take to continually purge these cognitive patterns would be more expensive and exhausting than most of the potential dangers of letting them exist.
But it’s possible to mindfully decide to cultivate the features and aspects of what emergently congeals there such that it’s more likely to be harmless, such as certain hobbies, fandoms, habits, or ritual-esque behavioral patterns.
Reflecting on our experiences against an anthropomorphized hypothetical observer to gain insights we would otherwise miss shows up even in places like computer programming - see “rubber duck debugging” - sufficiently strict religious sects would most certainly decry this activity as idolatry to a false god, even if YOU clearly do not classify a rubber ducky as a god. Because, again, the root of religiosity is group consensus of a socially shared memetic hallucination. what they perceive becomes a component of their beliefs even if it doesn’t become a component of yours.
This leads me to often consider spirituality, magical thinking, ritualistic behaviors, and religiosity in general as a bridge between our animalistic impulses and instincts vs. our sapience, or whatever you might label “higher” cognitive functions that enable abstract decision differentiation.
I believe I’ve seen this position referred to as “post-theist.”