Why will our lives be better if there was no Religion.

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I have to agree. Many people lack the coping skills to get them through life comfortably, so do need their faith to serve as a crutch. In this respect, and only in this respect, I think religion is a good thing.

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I think that a religious upbringing creates the need it satisfies. If one grows up basing his thoughts and develops emotionally around the idea of a protector, he ends up needing that idea.


Reality is a little intimidating as we learn to grapple with it, but with perseverance, one can learn to stand upright and face it on its own terms. One can stand up like the bipedal ape he was born to be, and look out into the universe, which may be almost empty, and which may contain no gods at all, and face and accept the very real possibility that we may be all there is for light years.

Accept that we may be vulnerable and not watched over.

Accept the likelihood of our own mortality and finititude.

Accept the reality of our insignificance everywhere but earth, and that you might be unloved except by some of the creatures living on the surface of a small planet.

Because as far as we know, that's how it is.

It isn't hard to do unless you first try to do it late in life, say after age forty or fifty. You can't very well expect people to begin at that point to find meaning and purpose without a god, or to develop the internal moral compass they would have had had they been raised in the tradition of rational ethics rather than trying to conform to biblical commandments.

How many times have you read believers say that life would have no meaning without their god belief? Unbelievers don't think that. They've learned to find meaning and purpose that the believer has never known.

How many times have you read believer ask what stops the unbeliever from berserking as in A Clockwork Orange given that they don't believe that anybody is watching them or will punish them if they aren't caught by the authorities? Once again, we're surprised to see how alien our experience is to them, but it apparently is.

That's what their religious upbringing did. Now, they need it.

And then there are the social considerations. If you've been part of a religious community - friends, family, church - and built your life around it, it can very difficult to face the consequences of restructuring one's life. You can expect severe repudiation and shunning.

"It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people. If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with." - Isaac Asimov

 

[fire]

I doubt everyone would consider themselves atheists. I really would see no reason for atheism to exist, there would be no religions. I want to know what the world would be like if everyone gave up religious beliefs. You can classify religious beliefs as you want. What would your world view be like how would it be better.

Religion can be considered to be like the weather, it's just something we endure or use to our temporary advantage. Wanting to eliminate it shows a type of personal control issue within the mind and soul of that type person, further more, it exposes the this person as being ignorant, compleatly missing the point of mortality. Every complex system and issue is seen by the unaware as trifling and un-needed.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Since schools seem to basically Not deal with morals, then a world without any religion could be an immoral world.

Since Scripture teaches that humans are part of creation, then our in-born conscience is connected to God.
If we ignore our conscience it can become hardened or calloused to the point of No more feeling for others.
So, it would seem to me that without religious morals mankind would decline in love of neighbor, etc.
As the earth was filled with violence in Noah's day, then today's violence will just escalate as people become further and further from God-given religious principles and morals.

The rational skeptic questions all claims including the one that Western religion generates better people. Multiple studies confirm that increased religiosity correlates with less morality:

"Religious Children are ‘Meaner’, Study Claimed" Religious Children are ‘Meaner’, Study Claimed

There are plenty more studies like that one. I'd be glad to supply a few

• "We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid." - Christopher Hitchens

• "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward the better treatment of the races, every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organised in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world." - Bertrand Russell

I have stopped listening to people telling me what Jesus said. I listen to what they say. Just listen to the news and you'll get a feel for the ethics of the religious community. It's not really too close to "love thy enemy" or "love one another." Look at how they just voted in the US. No more health care for millions of people or meals on wheels. That's what speaks to me about the effect of religion on people.

Check out this moral plasticity. From "Donald Trump and the Transformation of White Evangelicals at http://time.com/4577752/donald-trump-transformation-white-evangelicals/ :

"White evangelical Christians set a new high water mark in their support of Republican candidates by giving Donald Trump 81% of their votes, according to the 2016 exit polls.

"Back in 2011, consistent with the “values voter” brand’s insistence on the importance of personal character, only 30% of white evangelical Protestants agreed with this statement. But this year, 72% of white evangelicals now say they believe a candidate can build a kind of moral wall between his private and public life. In a shocking reversal, white evangelicals have gone from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his performance in public office. Today, in fact, they are more likely than Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all to say such a moral bifurcation is possible."

Sorry, but I require a little more from people than that. People with moral fiber and a well developed internal moral compass don't swing that dramatically or that quickly in such assessments. People that get their morals from commandments do. You just command them differently. All you need to do to manufacture their consent is to convince them that their god approves (Divine Command Theory of ethics: if God says or does it, it's moral - case closed, thinking over). They're straw in the wind.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

As far as I can tell, humanism is just a religion without the name, and 'humanity' is put in place of deity.

And chicken soup is just an ice cream cone with broth in place of the ice cream and a spoon in place of the cone.

If every worldview is a religion, the world loses its meaning and usefulness.

Religion has to serve some purpose vital to humanity, or (again, if there is no God) there wouldn't be any.

Not necessarily. It only need serve kings and priests.

Dawkins has an interesting hypothesis regarding how the priesthood has simply co-opted tendencies that evolved into human beings to serve another purpose. This is from an email correspondence with a friend:

"Richard Dawkins, whose book "The God Delusion" you mentioned, speculated elsewhere (link below) on the role of religion in human society, and asked some of the same questions you did - how could a system of thought that consumes so many resources offer an evolutionary advantage? You wrote, "Given that all human societies have some form of religion, it must have provided some survival advantage" - a reasonable and common assumption. In a nutshell, you seem to be arguing that the cohesive aspects of a shared world view offered more survival advantage than the costs incurred such as human and animal sacrifices, supporting a priestly class, building expensive temples and pyramids, etc...

"Dawkins answer was different and unexpected: it doesn't. What we are witnessing when we religions in virtually all human cultures is the co-opting of instincts that DO have a survival advantage that evolved before the advent of religion which those that benefit from it - kings and priests, mostly - could exploit.

"I'm distinguishing between the simple fears of nature being assigned agency - I liked your treatment of that, including the development of animism, appeasement of these agents, and ancestor worship - with what likely came later - organized religion, with sacred stories, rituals, moral systems, a world-view, and a class of people - the priests to administer it, for which effort they were able to avoid hard labor and earned social status.

"That co-opted instinct that does offer a survival advantage is for children to unquestioningly submit to authority figures, especially fathers and tribal chiefs. Dawkins describes this at more length in the link below. The priestly class simply invented a god or gods, and claimed it or they spoke through them. If it can get to people as children, they can keep them in that childlike, unquestioning trust, and magical thinking mode for life. We can easily imagine this phenomenon appearing everywhere, and see that it has no advantage to the average person while consuming resources.

"Dawkins uses the example of the moth spiraling into the flame or light bulb as an illustration of this usurpation of an instinct by a modern development. If you ask what survival advantage that behavior provided, the answer is the same: none. Following paths using light sources evolved when the only night lights were celestial bodies that were so far away that their beams. which the moth uses to navigate, are parallel for practical purposes. It's the radial beams emanating from nearby light sources that confound the moth and condemn it to spiraling into the light.

"Anyway, you make a good argument, and this was an alternative explanation for the phenomenon of organized religion that I thought you might find interesting. The arguments aren't actually contradictory. The survival advantage argument may be valid through the agency and sense of community stage, but the development of organized religion be best explained as a co-opting and exploiting event to benefit kings and priests..

"If you haven't seen it already, you might enjoy Michael Shermer's discussion of agenticity as a cognitive bias conferring survival advantage even in the beasts: Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World

"Here's the Dawkins link. Sorry about the very small type. It might help to copy and paste it to a word document and make the font larger. What Use is Religion? "

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Okay......given what I have observed about humans over the 67 years I have been observing myself and the other Homo Sapiens the absence of religion will not mean the end of all wars and conflict. It will reduce them simply because they will have one less excuse. That's a start.

The biggest harm that Christianity and Islam do is not to cause war. It is to promote faith based thought in place of critical thought. That has been devastating lately. It not only powers the bigotries of these two religions, it has led to some pretty poor performances by the American people, for example, in their duties as informed citizens.

Their approach to voting and to global warming is faith based. Neither of those is religious faith, but once you train people to think like that - to see faith as a virtue, formal education as a danger, science and scientists as untrustworthy, evidence as irrelevant, etc. - they're going to take that mode of thinking into other arenas. It puts everybody at risk.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Do you believe that the world will be better without religion

Yes, but I'm mostly thinking about the Abrahamic religions, especially in America and the Islamic world.

and we won't see rapists, robbers, criminals, drug addicts ....etc?

No. We expect to see smarter, kinder people with better values and a better worldview. Christianity promotes many, many bad ideas.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Marxism, as Marx wrote it, hasn't even been practiced, that and very few today dogmatically cling to Classic Marxism. And, yes, the state is another bane to peaceful existence. Marxism wouldn't have one.

Marxism seems to work at very small scales such as families, farming communes, and small religious colonies. In a family, everything is owned collectively, each gives according to his ability and receives according to his need. If all junior can contribute is to take out the trash, and he requires braces, that becomes the deal.

But at the scale of nations, we don't see much success, with too many devolving into genocidal dictatorships. I think that we can give up on Communist governments now. Constitutional republics with limited, transparent and divided government, church state separation, egalitarianism, the rule of law, and guaranteed person rights and freedoms seem to serve citizens better.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

with too many devolving into genocidal dictatorships.

That's pretty much how they started. There was no interest in a socialist transition or even rule by the proletariat. These nations we call Communist pretty much started as iron fist dictatorships.

I think that we can give up on Communist governments now.

In the Marxist sense, there is no state or government. It, along with class and money, are abolished. This is why many political scientists, historians, and philosophers do not label such places as Marxist, and often not even Communist, because classism was rampant, state control was absolute, and poverty was commonplace.
And do keep in mind, Marxism and Communism are not synonymous or interchangeable, and their are many variations on both ideologies.

Constitutional republics with limited, transparent and divided government, church state separation, egalitarianism, the rule of law, and guaranteed person rights and freedoms seem to serve citizens better.

Such states today have little power against the corporation, they allow for the rights and liberties of citizens to be put to a popular vote, and without hefty amounts of Socialism there is no guarantee or promise for the poor and those who fall on hard times. The others are necessary, but many, many things are too important to be decided on by those without knowledge and experience of the subject at hand, and it should never be tolerated that we allow citizens to vote on whether or not a minority group is granted equality or damned to endure legally protected discrimination. Matters that effect us all, such as the environment, should not be decided by those who do not understand that there exists a very direct correlation between the health of the environment and our own health. Only educators should make decisions about education, and only those who are trained and schooled in health and medicine should be making decisions about treatment plans and medications, not some group wanting to push treatments that are dangerous and damaging in the long run.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Good post! On top of that, promoting the view that "we're just animals" -- as CD evolution does-- will eventually lead to people viewing sex with "other" animals as natural. It's already mentioned in a nonchalant way on some TV shows! Already trying to condition the majority into accepting it! Sicko!

I assure you that understanding that man is an animal doesn't promote bestiality. Nor does a religious orientation prevent it.

And "just animals" is the Christian perspective. I don't consider animals "just animals."

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

There was no interest in a socialist transition or even rule by the proletariat.

Sure there was. A vanguard party ignites a revolution, claiming to be the face of the proles, they slaughter their class enemies and other members of the bourgeoisie (like all those pesky teachers and clerics), collectivize the means of production under State control (which nearly always leads to widespread famine, oops!), work to death or execute the naughty ones who are "anti-revolutionary" (or simply don't work "hard enough" or they just don't like them for whatever reason; doesn't matter, they're expendable and it's all just a means to an end), worship the party leader and hope this will eventually lead to a communist utopia. That's how Marxist movements tend to work when they get into power. There's few examples to the contrary and they tend to be killed off before they get very far (poor Rosa Luxemburg), either by capitalists, Fascists or their own Marxist brethren. Tsk tsk.

This is why many political scientists, historians, and philosophers

Which ones? Marxist apologists?

Such states today have little power against the corporation, they allow for the rights and liberties of citizens to be put to a popular vote, and without hefty amounts of Socialism there is no guarantee or promise for the poor and those who fall on hard times. The others are necessary, but many, many things are too important to be decided on by those without knowledge and experience of the subject at hand, and it should never be tolerated that we allow citizens to vote on whether or not a minority group is granted equality or damned to endure legally protected discrimination. Matters that effect us all, such as the environment, should not be decided by those who do not understand that there exists a very direct correlation between the health of the environment and our own health. Only educators should make decisions about education, and only those who are trained and schooled in health and medicine should be making decisions about treatment plans and medications, not some group wanting to push treatments that are dangerous and damaging in the long run.

You're going to need an authoritarian State to achieve that, you know. Sort of shooting your claims to the State being some nasty thing in the foot.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

The biggest harm that Christianity and Islam do is not to cause war. It is to promote faith based thought in place of critical thought. That has been devastating lately. It not only powers the bigotries of these two religions, it has led to some pretty poor performances by the American people, for example, in their duties as informed citizens.

Their approach to voting and to global warming is faith based. Neither of those is religious faith, but once you train people to think like that - to see faith as a virtue, formal education as a danger, science and scientists as untrustworthy, evidence as irrelevant, etc. - they're going to take that mode of thinking into other arenas. It puts everybody at risk.

That's mostly Evangelical Christianity and Saudi-funded and spread Salafist Islam.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

And "just animals" is the Christian perspective. I don't consider animals "just animals."

*Fundie Christian

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Marxism seems to work at very small scales such as families, farming communes, and small religious colonies.

That's not Marxism, technically, that's "primitive" communism or communalism. I believe in religious anarcho-communism, myself, but I mostly can't stand Marxism. They would likely kill me. Lol.

 

[leibowde84]

On the RF you constantly see the religious count down. More and more people leaving religion. Religion isn't necessary. Religion causes problems for everyone.

What I need to know is why is a world without religion going to be better.

Will Russia the US and China suddenly get along.
Will Pakistan and Israel suddenly become friends
Will North Korea become a paradise.
Will the US no longer have Women, Immigrant, Black, Gay rights problems.

Please give me you best thoughts for why a world without religion is going to be better. I am extremely curious.

I'll give you 2 problems
The RF will no longer exist.
You won't be able to use religion as your fall back for why everything is bad.

There wouldn't be discrimination on the basis of religious differences. There wouldn't be so much judgment regarding lgbt issues. There wouldn't be stigma regarding contraception, which would, undoubtedly, be considered a good thing. People wouldn't want unsubstantiated ideas like creationism taught to children. Just to name some things that would be better. Anti-semitism wouldn't have been such a devastating problem throughout history.

What would we lose if religion didn't exist?

 

[Shadow Wolf]

You're going to need an authoritarian State to achieve that, you know. Sort of shooting your claims to the State being some nasty thing in the foot.

You need not be authoritarian. And for clarification, I personally do not support total abolishment of the state, at least not while I remain clueless as to how to do such a thing while maintaining law, needed regulations, protections for minorities, and other issues such as domestic security that become very tricky and difficult, if not downright impossible, without a state.

That's mostly Evangelical Christianity and Saudi-funded and spread Salafist Islam.

Mormon, Jehovah's witnesses, neo-Paganism, Catholocism, Scientologists, and many others put faith in ignorance and pseudo-science instead of encouraging critical thought. Even a number of LHP religions fall prey to believing in nonsense and wanting money for membership.

I mostly can't stand Marxism. They would likely kill me. Lol.

Probably not. Even "back then" there was great disagreement within the Communist parties, with the Left members largely being executed or exiled. And today there has been much growth and evolution, to the point most Marxists are Neo-Marxists and homophobia isn't commonplace like it was even during the time when Foucault was a member,.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

I assure you that understanding that man is an animal doesn't promote bestiality. Nor does a religious orientation prevent it.

And "just animals" is the Christian perspective. I don't consider animals "just animals."

Ok, you don't see humans as superior?

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Mormon, Jehovah's witnesses, neo-Paganism, Catholocism, Scientologists, and many others put faith in ignorance and pseudo-science instead of encouraging critical thought.

Really? Exactly what "ignorance" and "pseudo-science" do I have "faith" in, as a Catholic? Be as specific as possible. And if you want to go that route, there's that "scientific socialism" bs.

Probably not. Even "back then" there was great disagreement within the Communist parties, with the Left members largely being executed or exiled. And today there has been much growth and evolution, to the point most Marxists are Neo-Marxists and homophobia isn't commonplace like it was even during the time when Foucault was a member,.

Forgive me if I don't take your word on it.

 

[paarsurrey]

Really? Exactly what "ignorance" and "pseudo-science" do I have "faith" in, as a Catholic? Be as specific as possible. And if you want to go that route, there's that "scientific socialism" bs.

Forgive me if I don't take your word on it.

"scientific socialism"
Thanks for pointing it out.
Regards

 

[Mary Blackchurch]

It has always been a rocky relationship between freethought and religion.

I agree, and that's really evident since Trump became president. I guess my point was/is that the religious tend to always win. Even Roe v. Wade - an already legally established civil right, is still being fought by religious people. And they just may end up winning with the republican figures that are governing the states right now. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see it repealed. And even though the Treaty of Tripoli states that the US was in no way founded on the Christian religion, they certainly do hijack it. Every chance they get, and unfortunately, they are still the majority.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

If religion was a human intellectual self deception why should we assume humans would replace it with something better.

It is very likely that by replacing Abrahamic religions with secular humanism, we will have made an improvement. Man's religious phase is the period between the time when he first evolved to the point of being able to "Why" until the time when he unraveled the answers.