this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Do you think the world would have been a better place if there were no religions? (self.asklemmy)
submitted 3 months ago by Timely_Jellyfish_2077 to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

My personal opinion (as a dispassionate atheist) is that religion isn’t the problem with human nature. In the U.S., for instance, we have some Christians who have strayed so far, I don’t get how they’ve even seen a Bible verse. But also, basically every major Civil Rights leader was a Christian preacher or woman of faith. There are similar situations everywhere. There’s Buddhists who are so non-violent they wouldn’t kill a fly and other “Buddhists” who commit genocide, which doesn’t even make fucking sense.

So, my view of religion is that it’s mostly not the thing to focus on. People can be organized for good or evil and there’s plenty of secular things where people define an identity. I suspect if religion never existed, we’d have all the same problems. I mean, we have soccer hooligans and it’s not because people object to 22 people getting some exercise on a lovely afternoon. (Or a miserable, rainy Wednesday night in England.)