See South Park episode Go God Go Part I & IIBut good in some ways in my view-less deaths, no religous wars.
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.
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.
Plenty of people go their whole lives without killing anyone.
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.
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.