Humans are adapted to be hunter-gatherers (nomads) but live in the age of agriculture and cities. As a result we have all sorts of things "hardwired" into us through millions of years of evolution, that was once useful but is now harmful.
Religion provided a means to de-toxify humans who carry about them the "sins" (murder, rape etc) that were once useful but are now very harmful to societies.
So toxic is "natural man" that it is possible that any societies that developed without religion did not survive. Today, in the west, we do our best to substitute the law, police and education for religion – with mixed results.
The latest development is communitarians trying to provde a secular morality as well provide room for faiths to exist. [Note: communitarianism is a v. influential community-based philosophy]
The problem with my theory is that it is bound to really annoy both theists AND atheists! (I’m an agnostic myself).
"tylertxa" – Can you provide examples of societies where social mores had developed but not religion? Simple, small-scale societies can perhaps cope with “great spirit” or nature-related religions but apparently not complex societies and life in the world of the city.
Yes, I’ve always thought about the same, though I wouldn’t use the same words. A need to believe in something does seem to be ‘hard wired’ into us, a part of human nature. Perhaps this does go back to hunter-gatherer times, or maybe even earlier than that.
And yes, religion and politics have always been twisted together, always supporting one another. Perhaps the first political leaders were spiritual leaders, but today (and in Biblical times) spiritual leaders were corrupted by politics. Appeals to religion (and religious morality) have been used by politicians since time immemorial, to the point where even today some ‘religious’ ideas are really political and vice versa, and it takes some careful, detached consideration to tell them apart.
Spiritual leaders who appoint themselves as arbiters of public morality are definitely political, not spiritual. The idea that one has to subscribe to certain religious beliefs in order to be moral, to live a justified life, etc., is definitely not religious, it’s political! The idea that only one religion is ‘true’, and therefore subscribers to that religion are entitled to special rights and privileges has always been political, not spiritual or religious. This is how religion has been used, for millennia, to justify exclusion, genocide, invasion and occupation, slavery, etc.etc., even though true spiritual leaders (like Jesus, for instance) preached against it.
