Does anyone have an opinion or thoughts on what the world might be like today if we had no forms of religion, at all, organized or otherwise?

I think religion, for better or worse, has created some boundaries for moral behavior in society which translated into legal laws and legal rights. Without these laws which define public morality and ethics, we could very well be in a state of chaos. Without worshiping a god, we could be worshiping each other. Or eating each other.

My belief is that religion became necessary when we stopped being hunter-gatherers and entered an agrarian lifestyle. When people began to live in proximity to one another, they needed a foolproof method to police themselves. Individuals as authority figures were susceptible to graft, figures in power were vulnerable to overthrow – none of these systems were effective enough to maintain the rules that allowed for society to develop. Therefore, an all seeing, all knowing figure of infinite power and infinite reward (heaven) was created to impose a “moral standard” that allowed us to live cheek-by-jowl with each other and kept the theft, murder, and other crime to a manageable minimum.

Once firmly entrenched, religion was a convenient escuse for the oppression and suppression of other cultures and other peoples. I doubt anyone can deny that much evil has been done in the name of religion (the crusades, the Salem witch hunts, the Inquisition, jihads – the list goes on throughout history and continues today).

I think that we are in the midst of outgrowing a need for the myth of “God” and will eventually move on. I think we have a much better chance of peace in the world without religion to fight over.

A lot of charity would cease to exist. A lot.

Sounds like a utopia

I think the need for religion is innate in man. Man has the need to explain the unexplainable. The problem comes when groups decide that their way of believing is the only right way, and everyone else is wrong. The reality is, no one knows.

I believe Robert Lax said, “There are as many paths to salvation as there are ways of believing.”

Devoid of hope.

It would be heaven?

I think it would be better. Think how many wars,battles and fights are or have been started over “religion”. (I think a lot of times it has only been an excuse) I think if we could all just accept other peoples thoughts and beliefs life would be good.

you would not exist because God is creator of all.

I think not everyone subscribes to that belief though, seVen. I believe that agnostics and atheists probably don’t share that view but I’m not certain of it.

@bluefreedom you are most certainly correct ^_^

Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

- John Lennon

Hopeless, chaotic, lost, unbearable, miserable….

Those left on earth after the rapture will experience all of this during the latter 3.5 years of the Tribulation… and it scares me for them because the Christians that make this world as livable as it is, will all be gone.

@Sloane: I think it’s kind of presumptuous to assume that without Christians, the world would be un-livable.

lol yeaaaa the christians are holding this world together…..

I beg to differ. I don’t think they are the only ones that give to charity either. I think people can have a good heart and good intentions even if they don’t believe in God. I don’t go to church and don’t consider myself christian, but I still want to make a difference in the world and give to charities!!! See thread

One essential thing that religion provides is a perspective that is separate and distinct from the state. If there were no religion, there would be no contrast between religious and secular life, no dialectic, no cosmological or moral discourse, no concern for the quality of life or human dignity, only the unbearable hegemony of the state. As anachronistic and useless as current religions seem, one has to consider their role in the dialectics of social evolution.

@seVen
”you would not exist because God is creator of all.”

Your statement is illogical. God does not exist because of religion, religion exists because of God. And both exist because of we have invented them. For the vast bulk of human prehistory, there were no gods.

imagine

I would say that religion and spirituality helped form the basis for internal investigation. It gave people something to ponder beyond the physical world surrounding them.

Through this process of enlightenment came many of the concepts upon which science and society were based. Now that we have an ingrained sense of morality, religion doesn’t seem as necessary but without it we may have never risen above our base instincts for survival.

Sure, there are flaws to point out, and there have always been those who pervert religious teachings for their own gain. But the same could be said of science, law and government.

Wiki: `Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the founder of the [Baha’i] religion, stated that religion without science is superstition and that science without religion is materialism. He also admonished that true religion must conform to the conclusions of science.

I think Plato’s Allegory of the Cave holds as true today as it did when written.

The first tract on the album, Imagine, would become Lennon’s legacy to a world living in rebellion against God. In the song, Lennon paints an “unrealistic” picture of life in the minds of his listeners. He sees a world without heaven or hell, without religion. He sees a world without countries, without war.

Though such a “dream” may seem admirable to many people, Lennon’s dream CLEARLY requires an abandonment of God and His Word. The Bible has divided more people than any other book ever written. Why is this? It’s simply because there is a heaven and hell John. There is a malicious devil who works relentlessly to DECEIVE us (2nd Corinthians 4:4; 11:3). There is a Loving God in heaven Who has provided us with a plan of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ. Humanity is sinful (Isaiah 64:6; Romans 3:10,23). No matter how much we try to fulfill Lennon’s dream, it WILL fail because humans are wicked, dirty, rotten, conniving, lying, stealing, murderous, hell-bound, sinners! Whether you believe the Bible or not, you CANNOT deny histories’ facts. If history has taught us only one thing, it has taught us that we do NOT learn from history. The Bible describes the woeful condition of man like no other book.

seVem,
“humans are wicked, dirty, rotten, conniving, lying, stealing, murderous, hell-bound, sinners!”

Speak for yourself, Christian!

@Seven: 1) On Fluther, we usually acknowledge when we have cut and pasted an answer, with a link to the source.

2) So, no one but a Christian can be a good, moral person? Bullshit.

You’re correct, you don’t have to accept Jesus to be a good moral person, but according to Christianity, that’s not enough to achieve paradise. Only through Christ’s sacrifice is redemption possible. Not through religion, not through goodness. Faith often has very little to do with religion.

There’s a major problem with this question, and that is that religion is not defined. It’s really tricky, because as someone said above, not too long ago, there was no difference between secular life and religious life.

Nowadays religion can include many features (a deity, an organization, dogma, holy texts, mysticism, altered states of concioiusness, quiet sitting or kneeling, ritual, dance, music, discussions, schools, shelters, farms, industries, and on and on). However, a religion need not have all these things. For example, Buddhism doesn’t have a deity.

Similarly, there are many organizations that have many of these attributes, but are not called religions. Most nations, for example.

In many countries there is an official religion. In many communities around the world, you can’t do any aspect of life without a religious official of some kind there. This is common with agrarian cultures.

So, if we had no religion, we might as well have no people. To make this question useful, you’d have to ask about what life would be like if there were no music, or no meditation, or, and I suppose this is probably what you had in mind, no concept of a Christian God.

I believe that the development of science required the development of the capability of making hypotheses. God is merely a hypothesis. It applies to everything we don’t know. Check it out, yourself, if you believe in a God. When you don’t know the whys and wherefores of something, don’t you revert to “it’s God’s will?”

Yet, as science develops more and more theories that the evidence supports, there is less that we don’t know (although the amount we don’t know will always dwarf what we do know. In any case, God is the explanation for what we don’t know, whereas science explains what we do know.

If we didn’t call that all-purpose hypothesis God, we’d call it something else. It is necessary, because evolution has made humans very uncomfortable with not-knowing. Just think how you feel when you don’t understand why something is happening? You need to try to control it, and yet you can’t, because you have scientific knowledge.

In our minds, this discomfort of not understanding builds and builds and it would drive us crazy if we didn’t develop a way to cope. How about an all-powerful, that shares many human traits (so we can feel it is possible to know it), and controls everything. Hey, if we pray properly, and make the proper sacrifices, this Charater will send us luck, and get us out of trouble.

And if we don’t get out of trouble, it must be our own fault for not being as good as this Entity wants us to be. See? It’s magic! It’s a kind of circular thinking that externalizes our anxiety, and makes it possible to fool ourselves into believing we understand enough about the world.

It is necessary to do this for most people. Everyone finds some technique for dealing with the unknown and the apparant unknowable. For most it is that which they grew up with.

I grew up with no religious training. No church. No dogma. No rituals. My Sundays were free for other things. But, I also missed out on youth groups, and trips, and charitable efforts.

Still, I’ve stuck with what I was raised with. I have nothing to explain the unknown. Nothing to make me feel like I will survive, except knowledge. And the things I don’t know about? Well, I figure it’s ok not to know. In fact, it’s fun. Because it gives me or other scientists something to try to understand.

@daloon: I don’t agree. Blue defined religion as “organized” or “otherwise” so he actually included all the definitions you provided. But, you did provide your opinion:

In many communities around the world, you can’t do any aspect of life without a religious official of some kind there. This is common with agrarian cultures.

So, if we had no religion, we might as well have no people.

I think this question WAS useful, and didn’t need to include what you suggested it did:
To make this question useful, you’d have to ask about what life would be like if there were no music, or no meditation

Your opinion is interesting daloon, but is from the perspective of someone who doesn’t believe in God, period. Not from a scientific viewpoint. There are MANY scientists who believe in God, so you don’t speak for all “intelligent humans”.

@siren: I’m sorry, Siren. It seems like you didn’t understand what I said, but I’m at a loss to see where to begin.

I think I’ll tell you my starting point. I asked, “what benefits can belief have in terms of helping humans be more successful?”

You understood, I hope, that one answer to that is that it helps humans explain the unexplainable. Scientists also experience many unexplainable phenomena, so they are as likely to need such explanations as anyone else.

It also seems like you didn’t understand the implications of the definitional discussion. Let me rephrase: everything is religion. There is no definition of religion that can exclude so many things we normally don’t think of as religion, while including the things we normally do think of as religion.

So while you may find the question useful, I have no idea what you, or anyone else here is talking about. Do you include daloonism? In daloonism, the deity is a humongous invisible purple dinosaur that communicates with humans by breath. Before you laugh at it, I ask you to disprove that the invisible purple dinosaur exists. There are holy scripts, and rituals (pretty cool ones, too), and we love to wear funny hats on our most solemn occasions. We have a very strict moral and ethical code (much more strict than most religions), so being a daloonist isn’t easy. The invisible dinosaur asks much of us, and we fail to succeed so often, that many find us to be a rather morose lot. Still, we persevere, for nothing is more important that trying to prevent humanity from killing itself off. The dinosaur looks kindly on human anthropocentrism. ;-)

@daloon: when was your last medical checkup?

jk daloon I think…

@siren: how old are you? joke, I think

As it happens, I have one this afternoon. This is relevant….. how?

I think one of the problems in this discussion is that we assume that all religions are theistic and are concerned with man’s relationship with supernatural beings with supernatural powers. After all, when we speak of “religion” it is almost always in terms of one of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

In my view, these deistic religions are terribly dangerous anachronisms, especially in their fundamentalist, millenarian, and apocalyptic varieties. True Believers armed with a sense of inerrancy and a perceived mandate from God, inevitably violate the rights of others. And they pose a special danger of getting locked in an apocalyptic end of days death spiral and taking the rest of the world with them. In addition, I find theism and supernaturalism a virtual fountainhead of individual delusion, social discord, irrationality, and anti-intellectual superstitious belief.

In contrast, religions like Taoism or Deism do not posit God at the center of their reality, so they aren’t in fundamental conflict with reality. They tend to have milder, more flexible, more human-centered, more rights-centered values, and more democratic means of achieving them. I think the world has outlived its need for spooky supernatural action at a distance, pigheaded belief, and authoritarian shock and awe morality. I think its both possible and desirable to reformulate religion according to more rational naturalistic principles—in which case, I would be happy to embrace such a religion. On the other hand, I think that theistic religions have long outlived their usefulness, and should be abandoned.

I think someone is making fun of other people’s beliefs – or the very fact that they have a belief. Wouldn’t it be better (and classier) just to agree to disagree, than try to make your point (unsuccessful by the way) by describing a hypothetical religion based on Barney? I mean, come on, that’s a rather crude and unnecessary analogy don’t you think?

Here’s some food for thought: most people in the world, statistically-speaking, follow some form of organized religion. What does that tell you? Can so many be wrong or misguided? And if that is the case, how is it that many of these same people have advanced mankind through invention and discovery? I am speaking about <<<horrors>>> scientists and logic-minded professionals. How can these intelligent individuals follow a belief system which contradicts the scientific method?? Mind-boggling, isn’t it?

Or should we all follow Daloonism because it is inane and fun to mock other religions?

From Slate.com:

It is at this point that the “We need God to be good” case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren’t those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don’t go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don’t believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they’re nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

For the rest of the article: http://slate.com/id/2203614/

Now Fireside’s answer – that’s classy!

@Syz: out of curiosity, what’s the population difference between those countries (Danes, Swedes) and the more “religious-minded” countries you are comparing them to? And, which countries are you comparing these to? I’m trying to put your response into a perspective, if I may.

For example, Saudi Arabia follows the sharia, or Islamic Law, which by western standards is quite harsh for some crimes (ie adultery, theft). However, the crime rate is extremely low. As a result or in spite of?

@siren: ok, seriously this time, what is your life experience? I’m having difficulty telling if you don’t understand because you don’t want to (and are baiting me) or if you don’t understand because you haven’t had enough experience to understand.

I am not making fun. I am trying to make a point. What evidence do you have for God? You keep arguing that a lot of people believe, and then you take that as evidence that something must be going on, because so many people wouldn’t be wrong.

That is spurious logic. You will find that if you try to find evidence for God, it is as strong as the evidence for some other magical creature. If you use people’s belief as evidence, then you have to confront other people’s belief in something else that explains the same thing.

There is no reproducable evidence for God. Does that mean religions are worthless? Of course not. Religions do an awful lot. They provide people with fellowship. That, on it’s own, is enough to support a religion. And if religions stopped with doing good work, and bringing people together, I’d be very happy, and probably join one.

Unfortunately, they have a history, and they revere that history too much for me. I can not sustain belief in anything that doesn’t have reproducable evidence to support that belief. The best that millions of people in religions who claim a deity says is that there is a social phenomenon. An interesting one, but just because a social phenomenon claims something is true doesn’t make it so. Still, it’s an interesting question as to why so many people would claim something to be true without evidence. I think I’ve offered a credible theory to explain that.

the whole point of faith is the absence of “evidence”...I choose to believe in my God because it feels right, not because someone proved it to me. Proof denies Faith, as Douglas Adams pointed out.

oh, and the whole point of Christianity is Faith.

Douglas Adams’s point in that dialogue was likely making fun of faith.

doesn’t make it less true, though.

How do you instill a sense of justice in someone?
Isn’t that just as intangible and individualized as faith?

Faith is about opening your heart and religion is about unifying society.

I would argue that many people who do not profess a belief in God still have an understanding of faith. Anyone who says it feels good to help others, is actually recognizing their spirit, at least as I would describe a spirit.

Ideally, society will recognize that connectedness and put aside their divisive tactics in favor of cooperative ones. I don’t think that will come from a purely intellectual position of thought though, I think that faith and unity come from the heart.

@fireside: you don’t have to instill justice or altruism or cooperativeness in anyone. We have evolved to do these things, because they offer us a survival advantage.

Not everyone follows them, because, as we learn from the prisoner’s dilemma, there is also an advantage to folks breaking the social compact, if only a few do so. When too many do so, trust is destroyed, and you get things like Congo or Sudan.

That “spirit” you feel, is your brain giving you a little reward for doing something it is designed to know will be helpfull to humankind in general and to you, in specific.

You and I have the same end in mind, but completely different understandings of where it comes from, or how to promote it. I believe that if we don’t have cooperation built on a purely intellectual position, we won’t get there. Faith can only take us so far. In the end, it leads to division, and only intellect can get us to a point where we see that all humanity is in this boat together.

I may be an atheist, but as far as I can tell, most religions have the same ends in mind that I do. The only difference is strategic. Religions say that these ends require faith (in one version or another). I think we can’t reach the ends except through reason. It also seems to me that in saying this must be based on faith, religion says that it has no faith in humanity getting there on it’s own.

Yes. Interesting. The requirement of faith for man comes because of a lack of faith in man.

You know, from reading this thread, I must assume that anyone of a religious leaning (as indicated here) considers me a poor excuse for a human being and a wasted member of society since I am a confirmed atheist.

I guess the blood that I donate very six weeks to the Red Cross doesn’t count, as well as the hours I spend building houses with Habitat for Humanity, or the seven years that I spent working for a non-profit conservation organization.

I guess I’ll stop collecting donations for the shelter in lieu of Christmas gifts this year, stop collecting for the local hunger drive, and make sure to never donate to another 501C3. I’d hate to disappoint those that think Christians are somehow better than non-Christians. Maybe I’ll even stop recycling!

I guess I’ll need to stop being conscientious, honest and reliable , too, since my personal success and happiness seem to challenge those opinions. I’ll suppose I’ll become miserable and lost any day now.

@syz – not me. I am a person that believes in religion, but it’s my choice. Just as you are an atheist. That doesn’t make you devoid of value as a human, not at all. Just as my choice in believing doesn’t make me a frivolous person with my head stuck in the clouds for believing in something that just can’t be proven. All in all, I’m a very practical person.

Keep doing what you are doing, anyone that judges your value, based on beliefs, well…that just shows that they aren’t taking the time to look at the big picture.

@syz – Personally, I feel that a major purpose of religion is to learn how to live with each other, much as you described above. It is about releasing the focus on yourself and your ego for the betterment of human-kind. Any religion that doesn’t hold that as a central tenet is in danger of slipping into irrelevance.

If you have already learned that you are not the center of the world, then you have achieved what many people would describe as enlightenment. I think there are many paths to enlightenment and everyone should choose what fits them best.

@daloon – I agree, the average Baha’i is much closer to secular humanists than most evangelical or fundamentalists of any religion. Stressing things like individual investigation of the truth, unity and consultation, the oneness of humanity, the sameness between science and religion, etc. is for me the only way to explore spiritual truths.

I don’t think it is right to discredit thousands of years of tradition, study and thought. To do so would basically be simply replacing “God” with “the Brain” and requires just as much faith in what is not known. As far as the progression of humanity, I see the Baha’i faith as a necessary step between the current major religions and humanism.

I would also argue that trying to form a moral code based on purely intellectual standards would be impossible without the thousands of years of spiritual thought that preceded us. It would also seem to me that it could just as easily become divisive without the aspect of faith. Who decides on the code, whose beliefs are left out of the code, how long do you think it would take for humanity to adopt that code?

If you look at the major prophets, there was about a 500 year difference between them and the religions that stemmed from those prophets still took centuries to develop into what we see today.

I think the real goal is to find a way to calm and control the ego. Beyond that, it doesn’t make any difference to me what you call it as long as you are focused on others and not your personal gain.

@fireside: I’m sorry. I didn’t make it clear. We evolved to develop morality, because it is a survival skill. All the intellectual and spiritual stuff we do comes afterward. The behavior comes first. We are better off if we cooperate and act as if all humanity is one.

Groups with humans that did not support the group first and themselves second didn’t survive. That left more cooperative groups. Over time, we all developed such traits to a greater or lesser extent.

Religious organizations reinforce the message, but they didn’t invent it. Intellect refines the forms and justifications of cooperation, but intellect didn’t invent it either. All the thinking comes after the fact. The feelings came first.

There is variation in the strength of the feeling, but in most people, it is strong enough to allow us to cooperate effectively in so many situations: family, friends, employment, nation.

I can understand that point of view but don’t necessarily think that the Native Americans were massacred because they didn’t get along as well as the white men. I think it probably had more to do with the weaponry. Is the lack of coordination among Native Americans the reason that Christ is more revered here than Pahana?

That thought reminds me of the movie The Last Samurai.
That group didn’t die because they had no sense of community or organization.
They just didn’t have Howitzers.

Sure the feelings are there, but someone has to point them out and codify them in order for societal development to occur.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the white men who killed the Native Americans, “good, God-fearing individuals”?

We had the morality/religion/evolution discussion a while back in a question I asked. It got heated, at times, but was a great debate.

Believe me, I’m not trying to say that simply calling yourself a religious person makes you a moral one. If I thought that was the case, i would still be Catholic.

I personally think that religion does more to encourage moral behavior than any other type of institution. But I could be wrong. And to me, it doesn’t matter as long as those core teachings are in your heart and you are acting out of cooperation and unity.

Cooperation grows over time. At first, the only people one could trust were members of one’s family. Then it grew to include the tribe. Then several tribes banded together to form a people, etc, etc.

When any of these groups ran into another one, they felt a threat, and responded to that threat with violence. But over time, we learned to cooperate with people we were former enemies with.

We’re still in that process. The only question is whether we will reach a stage of international cooperation soon enough to keep us from destroying the earth.

I think religion has been a help for a while, but I’m not sure it can help in the future. Religion brings divisions with it, too, and while there are all kinds of ecumenical councils and whatnot, trying to build bridges, there are also a significant number of sects weilding significant power who say it’s their way or the highway.

The key to all cooperation between folk who are different is tolerance. It might make more sense to change that famous button that says “teach peace” to make it say “teach tolerance!”

Hmm. I think I’ll go ask a question about how to achieve tolerance.

I agree for the most part and just saw your question about tolerance which I will think about before answering.

You can see the same progression in religious teachings about God’s covenants:
Abraham – Covenant with the individual
Noah – Covenant with the family
Moses – Covenant with a tribe
Christ and Muhammad – Covenant with (in my mind) a region
Baha’ullah – Covenant with the globe

As far as religions go, only the ones focused on Unity can help the future, the rest are simply tradition.

Religion is created by human mind. It is a way for human to escape not knowing what is happening around them, its a place for them to seek comfort when they are in doubt, and its defines human life. It happened long long ago before science and technology evolved. Back then there is nothing solid to explain human’s curosity unlike today. Religion brings us together, set up rules and disciplines that govern our lifestyle and gives us hope. It also created civilisation. Without any religion, we will still be in the ice age, not caring about anything just living with animal instrict – to survive.

Yowsers….this conversation has degenerated into a discussion about whether God exists. The original question was what the world would be like without religion. Most flutherers posted the same response, regardless of their position on religion. It is now veering into if there’s a God, whether I’m a loser because I don’t believe in one, why I should believe in your God, and so on and so on….

Does anyone have an aspirin?

Isn’t the whole point that we should respect each other’s beliefs and try to get along civilly, instead of trying to pick them all apart?

I thought it was a pretty decent conversation.

This is a good article that I saw today:
World asked to help craft online charter for religious harmony

www.charterforcompassion.org