Let’s say religion never existed. Let’s start with a clean slate and take one idea. Homosexuality. In your best educated guess what percentage of the people do you think would say that being gay was wrong? I’m guessing the numbers would be in the majority. Where would we put the blame if not religion? I guess we’d have to put it on the individual.
One thing that needs to be discussed is the impact of science and medicine on homosexuality and other types of alternate sexual behavior. Homosexual behavior, more so with homosexual males, leads to diseases. Science recognized this and created all kinds of precautions, and after the fact medicines, to deal with this disease problem. Now we have hidden medical wires that prop things up so the cause and affect of some diseases and behavior are less obvious. Many people live an illusion of their behavior being natural, even though propped up by science.
Before science, the social cause and affect of STD's could be inferred from certain types of behavior. Other than abstaining, there were no manufactured precautions or solutions in ancient cultures. Taboos appeared to protect people from themselves and lower the social costs. The only observed active sexual combination, that was more or less free of disease, was marriage between one male and one female. Disease is why things defaulted this way and taboos appeared. It was not a conspiracy.
Modern culture now has a wide range of medical prosthesis to protect people from themselves. However, the fact that such prosthesis is needed at all, shows that certain types of behavior are not optimized or natural. They have an extra social cost that religion was able to identify, early, even before science.
I was thinking about the new gender fad, since that fad is related to this discussion. What I saw as a common thread is all these combinations are socially influenced, self imposed methods of birth control. One cannot depend on all people taking the correct precautions for pregnancy. There is only one set of genders that can make children. The rest are sterile, in practical terms, based on the physical limits associated with those choices.
I can see this new fad as part of a Progressive plan to limit population growth and lower the amount of needed abortion. Abortion expanded into a problem, that appeared from the last generation of bonehead ideas. However, most of these new self sterile genders are still not able to avoid disease. But the disease prevention wires are much better hidden in plain sight. This helps to perpetuate the mythology of anything Progressive suggests as bring natural and good for you.