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? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] 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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It's tricky to say. Organised religion throughout history has been one of the biggest oppressive machines and cause of untold human life lost. On the flip side, religion has been the source (or at least financer) of an enormous amount of the most highly regarded artistry in our history.

The reason that isn't an obvious tip of the scale, is that if religion poofed out of existence, I'm almost certain that the oppressive machine would have just taken another form and still caused untold destruction, loss of life, and hatred. But I'm not sure the art would have still thrived as it did.