No religion?

To quote Cicero, "Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God."

Theological inclinations of my own aside, I believe it's impossible for the concept of God or gods not to develop. It's human nature and it's a constant. Like warfare and fornication, it will never go away entirely so long as humanity remains recognizable as human.
 
Intelligent Species 101:

Step 1: An intelligent race comes into being
Step 2: That intelligent race is dumb, and doesn't understand how things actually work.
Step 3: That intelligent race explains how things work with magic and gods who make all that stuff happen.
Step 4: A complex mythology comes out of the creation of these gods, with various background stories and legends and tales to live by.
Step 5: People become really devoted to these ideas. These ideas inspire literature, works of art, and various other projects and achievments.
Step 6: These people discover other people, except these other people have different explanation of how things work.
Step 7: These people kill each other on and off for several centuries.
Step 8: People discover that magic is not real and that there are scientific explanations for everything.
Step 9: The God or gods are relegated to existing beyond functioning actively in all steps of existence. Therefore fire starts because of heating molecules, not because a god wills it, but that god can still be said to work in the background in moving things around and making major stuff happen.
Step 10: The people who believe in the science part (often with the God in the background part too) rub off the wrong way on the people who believe in the God doing everything part. These people likely kill each other on and off for several decades or centuries, or piss each other off with protests and what gets taught in the classroom.

Bottom line: People need religion to explain things, or at least their ancestors did, and because their ancestors did, religion is already woven into the culture via millenia of existence, so those later people will get it anyway. Religion is not something that can be stopped from coming into being.
 
To quote Cicero, "Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God."

Theological inclinations of my own aside, I believe it's impossible for the concept of God or gods not to develop. It's human nature and it's a constant. Like warfare and fornication, it will never go away entirely so long as humanity remains recognizable as human.

According to current theories, it's an evolutionary thing born out of the Placebo effect. People who perform rituals and believe in superstisian basically trick their minds into success or failure and over generations the effect becomes more dramatic.

Of course a theist like myself believes it's because of the actual hand of God guiding evolution, but that's personal.
 
Plenty of people go their whole lives without killing anyone.

I'll grant you that. Humans are completely capable of living entirely peaceful lives just as they are capable of living an entire life without sex or living their live devoid of religious practice or belief. But the fact that people can live without doing these things does not disprove my point.
 
Intelligent Species 101:

Step 1: An intelligent race comes into being
Step 2: That intelligent race is dumb, and doesn't understand how things actually work.
Step 3: That intelligent race explains how things work with magic and gods who make all that stuff happen.
Step 4: A complex mythology comes out of the creation of these gods, with various background stories and legends and tales to live by.
Step 5: People become really devoted to these ideas. These ideas inspire literature, works of art, and various other projects and achievments.
Step 6: These people discover other people, except these other people have different explanation of how things work.
Step 7: These people kill each other on and off for several centuries.
Step 8: People discover that magic is not real and that there are scientific explanations for everything.
Step 9: The God or gods are relegated to existing beyond functioning actively in all steps of existence. Therefore fire starts because of heating molecules, not because a god wills it, but that god can still be said to work in the background in moving things around and making major stuff happen.
Step 10: The people who believe in the science part (often with the God in the background part too) rub off the wrong way on the people who believe in the God doing everything part. These people likely kill each other on and off for several decades or centuries, or piss each other off with protests and what gets taught in the classroom.

Bottom line: People need religion to explain things, or at least their ancestors did, and because their ancestors did, religion is already woven into the culture via millenia of existence, so those later people will get it anyway. Religion is not something that can be stopped from coming into being.

Agreed
Belief is an essential part of the process of being intelligent
Certainly the intuition of people who first developed a form of belief is just as huge as the self-proclaimed "logical" ones trying to prove it wrong now

And even if becoming intelligent AND ignorant is possible, ignorant as in not trying to explain what happens around them, there are way more reasons to go to war other than religion. Greedy humans would find another "justifiable" reason to go to war. IMHO it would be race.
 
Intelligent Species 101:

Step 1: An intelligent race comes into being
Step 2: That intelligent race is dumb, and doesn't understand how things actually work.
Step 3: That intelligent race explains how things work with magic and gods who make all that stuff happen.
Step 4: A complex mythology comes out of the creation of these gods, with various background stories and legends and tales to live by.
Step 5: People become really devoted to these ideas. These ideas inspire literature, works of art, and various other projects and achievments.
Step 6: These people discover other people, except these other people have different explanation of how things work.
Step 7: These people kill each other on and off for several centuries.
Step 8: People discover that magic is not real and that there are scientific explanations for everything.
Step 9: The God or gods are relegated to existing beyond functioning actively in all steps of existence. Therefore fire starts because of heating molecules, not because a god wills it, but that god can still be said to work in the background in moving things around and making major stuff happen.
Step 10: The people who believe in the science part (often with the God in the background part too) rub off the wrong way on the people who believe in the God doing everything part. These people likely kill each other on and off for several decades or centuries, or piss each other off with protests and what gets taught in the classroom.

Bottom line: People need religion to explain things, or at least their ancestors did, and because their ancestors did, religion is already woven into the culture via millenia of existence, so those later people will get it anyway. Religion is not something that can be stopped from coming into being.

I like your assessment. Insightful and succinct. Kudos! :)
 
It depends very much on how you define religion. If you say that all supernatural explanations are definitionally religious, then religion really is absolutely inevitable (see Emperor Norton's post).

However, religion can be defined in contrast to magic. Levi-Strauss had the following to say on the subject:

'Religion consists in a humanization of natural laws and magic in a naturalization of human actions- treatment of certain human actions as if they were an integral part of physical determinism- these are not alternatives or stages in an evolution. The anthropomorphism of nature (of which religion consists) and the physiomorphism of man (by which we have defined magic) constitute two components which are always given, and vary only in proportion.' (The Savage Mind p.221).

Now what seems obvious (to me anyway) is that the religious component of belief-systems has predominated over the magical in all of the major literate civilizations. We don't have major civilizations with shamans, practicing totemism. Instead, we have major civilizations with Gods and priests. Could this have turned out otherwise? If so, I think that its the closest that we get to a world (or at least some of the world) without religion.
 
Well, this is tricky. If you go with some views, religion was first used to explain the world around us. It was only when philosophy and science emerged that religion began to define its own field. For example, the ancient greeks believed that lightning was Zeus getting pissed off. If they don't have religion, how will they explain such a thing? Maybe they won't care, in which case, congratulations on slowing the development of science and philosophy.
 
Impossible.

Humans are pack animals, an integral part of our wiring requires us to search to be part of something bigger than we are, because being alone in the dark is no fun. Explaining the unexplainable falls into the same little hole in our brains. God/the gods/heaven is the big beard in the sky, the all powerful figure that we can justify our actions with or unconciously rely on to make things better when they're not good. In other words, a parent.

To get rid of religion, you'd have to change our sociology, mindset, and maybe even biology.
 
Top