To me it is so obvious that the same behavior would be going on even if the wss no religion. People don't break into someones house and steal because of religion. Nor do they need religion to rape or murder someone and I don't think you even need religion to make good people do evil things. You just need to convince them that someone outside of their group has wronged them or intents to, look at the war in Iraq.
Imagine no religion - living life in peace?
by jws 12 Replies latest jw friends
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jws
To me it is so obvious that the same behavior would be going on even if the wss no religion. People don't break into someones house and steal because of religion. Nor do they need religion to rape or murder someone and I don't think you even need religion to make good people do evil things. You just need to convince them that someone outside of their group has wronged them or intents to, look at the war in Iraq.
It is hard to play 'what if'. But let's back up. Why are people stealing? Because they're poor? Or supporting an addiciton?
Many of the economic problems in the US can date back to things like slavery. Religion, it can be argued, had a hand in slavery. Or at least people used religion to justify that slaves were descendants of the cursed line of one of Noah's sons and weren't the same. Maybe that they didn't have souls. So it was OK to make them slaves. When the slaves were freed, the economy of the south was devastated. And the former slaves didn't fare too well either. We're only a few generations away from that. And poverty is a hard thing to break out of.
Drugs are another issue. Drug policies are driven by racism and religion. Countries that have more open drug policies and offer treatment instead of punishment have fewer problems with addiction. Addition can cause people to steal.
Not all of those problems can be laid at religion's feet, but I would say religion does play a part.
But you do have a point. Some evil is not motivated by religion at all. For example, greed is also an evil in the world and also motivates bad deeds.
As for the war in Iraq, I wouldn't excuse religion from that. It's religious groups that are fighting each other. Not because they're different from one another. How different can people who live in a small country be? It's because each of them believes differently. And they're fighting us because we've invaded their country. Our invasion is also seen by the Muslim world as a sort of revival of the crusades and has stirred up much hatred for the US.
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rmt1
Religion is the predilection for a group to maximize chances of survival by realigning animal evolutionary suspicions with some dominant polarity of narrative etiology. It is not a superficial facet of homo sapiens. It's an integral component of consciousness and responsible for getting homo sapiens up out of prelinguistic fear-response and being able to assign some approaching-rational cause to the thunders and lightnings of evolutionary past. In our modern terms of consciousness, there is no possible state of "What if there was no religion." There would be no homo sapiens if there had not been religion. But what you'd have is what you'd be back to originally, before "religion" conferred group fitness through galvanization. You'd have an upright, larger version of chipanzees - highly intelligent and social but not in a position, yet, to conceive, communicate and explain to each other the phenomena in their environment. One could well call that a peaceful period - we were a long way off from Predator drones. There was no ideology around which to formulate pre-existing rights to resources. The worst threats were animal predators, disease, starvation, exposure, and an occasional "homocide" through basic competition. But you could still call that period "living life in peace", relatively. As for modern homo sapiens "living life in peace," that would take weed.