yvanckatron:
religiousragings:
Couldn’t figure out murder is wrong by yourself, huh?
Even if the world was devoid of religion, morality would still be subjective on the individual level. It would be grossly skewed from individual to individual and culture to culture because we all have different perceptions and interpretations of physical reality. If you are an atheist and you believe that religion is simply a tool of social control consider this: what would be the state of our world today if no religions had ever existed? Please, honestly and thoroughly think about it for a minute or two.
Let’s see…
Without religious dogma to fall back on, the ignorant would have had very little to support their hatreds. The smartest people of their time, the philosophers, would likely have dominated, because their philosophies and such could be proven to work. Secular ethics would likely have become dominant, much, much earlier.
And without religion, we would not have had any reason to believe that we knew anything about the world except by studying it. So the scientific method may have been discovered and universally applied perhaps 5000 years earlier than it did. Which means that we would have had our current explosion in technology perhaps 4500 years ago.
Without the delay caused by religion, we may have recognized population problems before they occurred, and without religion constantly pushing people to have more children, the world’s population may have leveled off somewhere around 3 or 4 billion.
So, less starvation, less war over limited resources, no war over religious differences, no crusades, far fewer genocides, less health problems caused by over population, consequently less pollution. Perhaps more time to recognize global warming before it occurred, and less opposition to the science that recognizes it and suggests changes.
And without religion, people would have likely spent tithings on charities instead, again more quickly putting an end to world misery.
Sooo…there still would have been wars, mindless death and destruction, atomic weapons, arms races, and dictators. But I would think that after 5000 years science would have found ways to deal with mental illness and come up with better foods and better, cleaner energy alternatives than fossil fuels. The driving motivation behind wars would thus diminish, and perhaps after 5000 years they would be looked upon as an aspect of humanities infancy.
And thus of course, without religion the computer singularity would have happened millennia ago, and artificial intelligence might have been a massive help to solving all of the world’s remaining problems.
Where would we be right now? Hard to say, but I would hazard to guess that we’d have colonies around several nearby stars at the very least.
So, yeah. This is about as honest as thorough as I can make it on short notice.
Of course, I do have to acknowledge that we never would have had the wisdom of a 2000 year old book telling us not to eat shellfish. But some sacrifices would have to be made.
~ Steve
