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Originally Posted by Phaseolus  To the question (finally!)... A lot of you have heard this one before but its very important to me so please indulge me. WOULD THE WORLD BE A BETTER PLACE WITHOUT RELIGION? for some of you the answer may be fairly simple..an over whelming YES! since a lot of conflict and strife in the world's past and present has been and is a consequence of while for some others it may be no, arguing that it serves as a moral and emotional support/compass etc in life whose benefits cannot be argued. |
I don't think the answer to that question would necessarily be simple. First, we don't know all the many forms "religion" might take; we only know those
specific forms which have happened historically. Not every possible religion has presented itself. It IS possible that some as-yet-uninvented religion MIGHT be extremely beneficial to us, IF it were to come along.
Since we have never experienced all the possible forms of religion, it is literally impossible to answer this question.
Having said that, it's possible to answer a slightly different question:
Would the world be a better place, without the religions that currently exist?
There are some complications here too, because ... let's be honest about this ... religion has brought about some good, which should not be quickly dispensed with. For instance, historically the notion of a hospital as we know it, is largely a product of medieval Christianity. Many were staffed by religious folk (monks, nuns, various other oblates of varying degrees of consecration), and some medieval orders were solely devoted to operating them.
That is just one example. Can you really say that we'd be better off without hospitals? (No, you can't really say that atheists would have built them too, we just don't know if they would have or not.) We all know the horrors inflicted on humanity by religion, but the benefits are just as real, if not as prominent.
What we can say about the benefits vs. the atrocities, though, is that the beneficial aspects of religion tend to present themselves either in individuals or in small groups, whose religious affairs are limited to themselves. The atrocities are caused by large groups working in concert, or by the desire of religious groups, of any size, to impose their religion on outsiders.
Now ... this brings us back to my initial observation, which is that since we don't know all the forms religion can take, we can't say if we'd be better off without it. We can now see that a beneficial religion -- if there is one -- would operate on an individual or small-group level. It would be one which is either not communalized, or is targeted to a small community. It would also be one which is NOT missionary in nature (that is, it has no desire to spread).
Is such a religion possible? There are non-missionary religions in the world. Among them is
Judaism. The same might be said of many religions in history, including many forms of Hellenic mysticism, especially of the Orphic variety (e.g.
Pythagoreanism). I'm not aware of any historical violence caused by Pythagoreanism; they were a peaceful bunch that kept to themselves. There have also been other religious groups that never affected others at all.
This rambling response to your question is not really much of an answer (because I don't think it's answerable). But it should give some food for thought for anyone who's interested.