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.
The answer (to me) is a resounding yes. I firmly believe that belief in the Supernatural is in-built into all of us. It’s an off-shoot of us being incredibly good at pattern matching combined with our need for parental guidance for so long and a fear of death -
To get past this, we need two things: A personal willingness to ask questions and follow the answers (which is a basic description of science) and we need a society that is willing to embrace these individuals.
That we aren’t quite there yet means we end up with leaders embracing religion, which is reinforced by the masses accepting their dogma. The whole thing about “religion creating morality” is BS and just another form of dogma.
It may be entirely simplistic, and it probably puts too much faith in human capacity, but I think we could move in that direction if we just prioritized learning and inquisitiveness. Note, this is not the same as making people go to college. Learning is a life skill…