see Israel/Palestine border. Extrapolate from there.

No division to inspire violence?

so you could then point out that man is inherently evil and religion is the answer or some such of the usual tripe.

Differences in religion cannot be bargained/traded/reasoned away. If you are kind to other religions you will go to hell. It's a stupid question. Without the absolutism of religion differences of opinion can be worked out.

You clearly think religion is good for people in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary b/c of 'faith' or whatever. I've lurked through your muck enough to know your pattern. Great you need the rusty wire holding the cork that keeps your anger in. The faith I have is people would be better without religion.

Given that I did not make the point that man is evil.

So you have faith that absent religion, people would be better.

Don't act like this thread you created exists in a vacuum.

You can search the religion group for my many posts so it should be easy for you.

First the bait, the seeming innocent question on religion, then comes the switch and the passive aggressive jabs at anyone who disagrees with the OP's preferred religiosity.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Pose a hypothetical question and when someone suggests an answer, “faith”.

Exactly. At the very least, those differences have a better chance of being worked out when neither side thinks their position is THE WAY THE UNIVERSE MUST BE.

Based on what exactly?

A world without religion would be a world with no religion inspired violence, intolerance, oppression and idiocy.

It is likely that would result in less in total of all of the above.

whatever deities they require. Explanations for unexplainable things and authorities to give force to rules are why.

Religions define a cultural framework and are defined by cultures.

See my signature line for my authority to make these declarations.

What if religion had never existed? What would have been different, if anything?

Your question has no possible answer.

If humans create out own institutions, why was it unavoidable for humans to seek answers and seek knowledge of a deity?

Are you saying that humans must seek out deities?

For a very large portion of human existence, no answers were available for most question regarding nature and reasons for things. Humans desire answers, so a powerful outside force is a simple way of dealing with a lack of knowledge. "God did it," is easy to say. If it satisfies, then you're done.

Looking at the religions of basic cultures, it's easy to see this at work. Of course, we can only look at basic cultures which were in existence during a relatively modern period. We cannot look at earlier cultures that existed before literacy.

Shamanistic religions were probably the first religions. The shaman was the story-teller who offered acceptable answers to such questions.

between Hinduism and Egyptism(?). Not sure what to call it.

The pharaohs had pyramids built to take all their crap with them. Building the structures took years. The life cycle was very predictable the Nile river blooded in pretty regular cycles.

Hinduism developed along the unpredictable flooding of the Ganges. Your life is not in control Karma dictates your past and future lives.

Two very clear examples where religion was dictated by the environment.

"Humans create the religions they need."

And if so, the net result would be....?

We know one less is one less, or 2-1=1. Wondering if something would replace it is speculation indeed.

Similar to believing that less religion would lead to better outcomes.

One has to wonder what motivated you if you knew the post was sheer speculation and did it anyway.

See this:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1218284634

"What if religion had never existed?"
I answered.
The thing is, I offered dialogue and you followed with another question that had nothing to do with my answer. You didn't care about my answer, as evidenced by trying to negate my answer with speculation that even you admit. I'm trying to respect you, I'm trying to talk to you. I have been since I said I am glad you are here. And I am glad you are here. But you asked a question and I took my time to answer respectively and you did not respect my answer enough to ask questions about it, rather you veered off into attacking my answer by implying that it wouldn't matter. Dialogue and respect are two way streets.

Sounds like maybe humanism would be the way to go then.

Especially secular humanism!!!

My view is that tribalism and division are an inescapable part of humanity. But I hope always for a change.

Its obvious that things can overcome tribalism to a certain extent, you mentioned that Religion can do that. With that being said there is still tribalism within religion as there are conflicts between religions. If humanism makes us all one tribe what would be the problem?

Whatever unites us and makes us aware of our common interests is a good thing, but people who desire power also love to divide us to increase that power.

that we all could get along better than we are now. For a lot of humanists it is not that religion cant be in it, but that the major part is that we should treat each other with respect and acceptance as humans and that it is more important than religious beliefs.

And you're getting rather nasty in response.

The world would be a much better place had divine right never existed.

He posted this in order to bait people into responses that he could then attack.

Transparent as can be.

Could have titled this #9 and had the same effect.

If we didn't have religion, we'd still have spirituality. We'd have the emotional satisfaction that spirituality brings, without the baggage of religion. So we'd have one less thing to fight about.

Neither asked nor implied as a negative attribute.

Spirituality is for people who have been there.

That tells you all you need to know about my spirituality.

And help them to cope perhaps?

Religion is a sign of the natural curiosity of humans. They saw nature and wondered how it worked. Well, what does make things work? A person! So what does make nature work? A person!
All these gods and spirits and so forth are essentially just another form of people. And in religion we credit those unknown people for doing things we have no alternative explanation for.



I guess, one of the most important inventions of religion is the notion that there is an underlying order in the world. And if you start from that notion, finding out what kind of order it is is the next step.

Another important invention of religion is the notion that the human mind and spirit is a material part of the world. This world-view created notions like souls and prayers and magic. If you look at scholars up to including the Renaissance, it was taken for fact that the humand mind and the human soul are a part of the natural world, just like the ground you stand on and the stars above you.



Where would we be without those?
Where would we be without the opinion that there is an order in the world?
Where would we be without the opinion that the human is an integral part of the world and therefore capable of influencing the world?
What exactly the human mind is, that is still up for debate, but it was magical experiments that eventually evolved into science.

Do you know how the magician John Dee called the laws of nature that determine whether a machine works or not?
He called them "real artifical magic."

Without religion science would have moved forward much more quickly.

Religion gave us nonsense such as diseases being caused by Jews or witches, not bothering to count the teeth in a horse's mouth because they could be determined by faith, insisting that the sun revolves around the earth, and so on.

Religion shut down logical thought and investigation for centuries.

An attempt to explain the world.

but it was NOT science. Not in any possible definition or understanding of the word science. It was not systematic. It wasn't, still isn't, falsifiable, which is EXACTLY why when religion pretends to take on the trappings of science it fails utterly.

And again, all you have to do is look at the many, many times over the millennia that religion has stood squarely in the path of science, or any rational understanding of the world, and you'll understand that religion has never been science. Not even for early humans. It was always religion.

There is a logical thought in religion. The big problem is that those logical conclusions are made on claims that are unverifiable. (I'm currently reading a book about this and it is shocking to which great lengths these philosophers and esoterics and religious scholars went. How f**king dead-serious and passionate they were about arguments which are entirely theoretical, flimsy and interchangable.)

As for investigation: Maybe. However one of the philosophical foundations of modern science is that we can glean information about nature from doing experiments. That is a very young attitude, only about 500-600 years old.
For most of human history, practical experiments have been looked down upon as the works of tinkerers and amateurs. (Which is not difficult to understand when taking into account the primitive technological level with which experiments were conducted and how unreliable their results were.)

For example, consider magical rituals. A shaman saved somebody once by doing a thing, and that was taken as proof forever and ever that magic is real.

(the Scientific Method) at best goes back 250-300 years. It is, essentially a product of the Enlightenment which was a moving away from blind religious faith to actual reasoning, looking for cause and effect, and going from there.

Very rarely did magic rituals result from something that worked, but more often because they were convinced something might work.

As for "logical thought in religion", the "logic" was based on blind assumptions (people get the Plague because Jews poisoned the wells, but killing Jews did not result in the Plague going away, just to give one example). The strength of religious faith and belief simply overwhelmed anything else. Even among modern, educated people there's a lot of holdover of that kind of magical thinking. We see it all the time when someone posts something about a friend or relative being sick, having been in a terrible accident, whatever, and a request is made for prayers. Or someone's recovery is credited to prayers and faith, rather than the work of doctors and medical science. The anti-vaxxers, the religious groups that don't do things like blood transfusion, based on completely erroneous belief, all of those are still with us, and not confined to places where people have never been in touch with modern science.

It is certainly possible to have strong religious faith and understanding of science, but religion has often been the enemy of science and logic.

Because then you wouldn't be upset with people criticizing it.

of the human psyche.
So we would have to see how that make up would be different and then theorized what the results would be.
It's like saying if human's weren't meat eaters.

A different human mind.

than “hundreds of thousands of years”. You keep repeating this nonsense even though you have been repeatedly informed that it is bullshit.

When you frame your thesis in bullshit it all stinks.

And when the bananas went black from over ripening, the storms and thunder came, necessitating the first monkey sacrifices and setting the table for humans to do likewise several thousand years later!!

The creation of 'gods' and 'supreme beings' has always been used to explain the unknown and to control the masses for the benefit of the few in a ruling class. Always was, always will be...doesn't make it true, right or valuable, just makes it real pain to deal with...

We have a pretty good idea when civilizations actually began. Maybe about 6-7000 years ago. Estimates vary somewhat, and typically don't include Asian civilizations. Prior to that time, we know almost nothing about what people thought or believed. We simply do not know.

100,000 years ago, humans were still living in small groups, with limited interaction and no economical structure. If they had religion, it would have been some sort of shamanistic, naturalistic religion. That was the case when we began studying basic cultures that survived outside of our civilized places.

Some of those religions involved deities, but not all of them. Many were pantheistic, with spirits inhabiting everything.

To say that humans have had organized religion for "hundreds of thousands of years" is simply ridiculous. To continue to claim that, in the face of actual information, is much, much worse than ridiculous.

Some people simply have no understanding of the history of mankind. None. They simply haven't bothered to try to learn anything about it, either, or they wouldn't say such patently false things.

'Tis a puzzlement...

And then conflated both under “hundreds of thousands of years”. Shamanistic practices might go back, by actual evidence, 30-40,000 years. Organized religion not even close to that.

We know so little of how humans lived that long ago. We know nothing of what they thought or believed. Some people claim that humans have a built-in need for something spiritual or religious. They have no evidence for that, of course, any more than they have any evidence for the existence of deities.

Current concepts have Homo Sapiens appearing on the scene about 100,000-140,000 years ago. About those first modern humans, though, we know almost nothing. Maybe 40,000 years ago, they started leaving behind some remnants of their lives. Personal ornaments, totems, and a few images.

Their social groups were small. Their way of life was simple. What and how they thought about things, however, is completely unknown. No doubt it varied widely from place to place, but symbolic thinking was probably part of it, worked into the very difficult task of simply surviving.

No doubt, some of the folks here probably think that they sat around their campfires and had deep philosophical discussions. That seems highly unlikely to me. More likely, they spent their time trying to plan how they would get enough food to eat the next day. But, we don't know, because they did not keep records of such things.

Anyone who claims to know is piling bullshit on bullshit.

year timeline for religion, and I’d go along with 30-40,000 for some form of animism. A dialog about religion within that framing would be fine.

It is the tedious repetition of “religion goes back hundreds of thousands of years”, of the blatant and intentional dishonesty of that phrase that irritates me. It aborts the discussion.

It indicates a lack of investigation and wilful acceptance of false statements by others. It is FAIL.

The evidence for organized religion goes back at most to about 10,000bce, and that one site is not conclusive. Generally it is coincident with the development of agriculture and urban settlements - 6-7000bce.

Animistic practices are likely much older, but again the evidence does not substantiate claims greater than 30-40,000bce.

But seriously, the question is almost laughable from an anthropological POV. Religion is omnipresent across all cultures, much in the same way that childhood is omnipresent in the life of everyone who has ever lived. Doesn't mean society, like individuals, can't eventually grow up.

With apologies to Joyce, religion is the nightmare from which we're trying to awaken.

I prefer Harrison's My sweet Lord for message and musicality.

That said, I really like the silent one. He knew what was up; studied Eastern mysticism. Are you familiar with his song Cockamamie Business?

Thank you for the title.

with fewer religious wars centuries ago?

Of course, with fewer wars, maybe there would have been more scientific advancement, including easier, safer contraception.

faster use of resources, more war due to depleted resources and overcrowding.

contraception. The RCC promotes large families, worldwide, even in areas of famine and want.

Increasingly, so do many fundamentalist church leaders, who are leading the way in a push to make contraception more difficult to obtain. The same Christian groups are promoting the "quiverfull" movement, which encourages couples to have as many children as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

On the other hand, humanists have encouraged thoughtful family planning for a very long time.

cause of death. Compared to disease and natural disasters like drought and famine.