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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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This is a hard question. I think that we would be better off if more people adopted secular worldviews. But throughout history? I don't think we can simply say "what if there were no religions" -- we'd have to be completely different creatures for it to have gone that way. But I do think we'd be better off if we were that kind of creature.
It's interesting that every group of people, basically ever, has started a religion. I'm no anthropologist, but as far as I know, every civilization to have ever existed has formed one. Forming a religion is as natural as forming a language. Clearly, it's a thing we do. Lacking an explanation for our questions, from "what are rainbows?" to "what happens when we die?" we will apparently just fill something in. Everyone did it.
For us to have not formed religions, we'd have to be more comfortable with uncertainty. We'd need to have been better at accepting that we don't know some things, and we can doggedly look for answers, but we shouldn't insist that we know something before we really do. And I think our species kind of sucks at that.
If we were better at accepting uncertainty while still pursuing answers, we'd all be better off. And maybe, as a side effect of that, we wouldn't have formed religions.
When Og and Bog saw the sun come over the hill one morning, and Og was like, "Hey Bog, how do you think that happens?" Bog should've said, "I don't know. Maybe someday, someone will know." Instead, Bog went off on some real bullshit, and now here we are.
One such example of a group of people who had NOT developed religiosity I'm aware of, interestingly, also did not develop mathematics or written language, because the capacity for abstraction which form the substrate that religions grow upon is ALSO a prerequisite for speculative concepts like symbolic meaning and set theory.
I'm speaking of certain mostly out of contact tribes of humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people
And even they, despite living with an exclusively direct observation empiricism-based worldview, are still susceptible to collective hallucination (though they don't cultivate it into an organized system that will ever persist beyond those who directly experienced any given hallucinatory event).