What would the world look like with no religion or no belief in any gods?

[Moonwalk]

6. Getting rid of gods/religion doesn't get rid of human nature, unfortunately. This includes....

Greed, stupidity, aggression, jealousy and a host of other unpleasant things--as well as the good stuff like empathy, selflessness, etc. Which is to say: as an Atheist, I'm not going to fool myself into believing that erasing religion would magically make us better beings, any more than I'm going to believe having religion magically makes us better beings. The evidence is really against either being true.

We would, however, be very different creatures if we examine exactly how to unilaterally get rid of any belief in gods or religion. Because, as any wise atheist will tell you, what causes people to believe in such is not so easy to get rid of without getting rid of other things useful for human survival and evolution. For example: Superstition. Our tendency to make the post-hoc-ergo-proper-hoc mistake. We pray for rain, it rains, ergo our prayer caused the rain (and by extension, something listened to the prayer and gave us the rain). Getting rid of this would seem to be a good thing, but what about this: we stick our hand in a fire, it burns, therefore fire burns and we shouldn't stick our hand in it. Can we get rid of the superstitious post-hoc reasoning without getting rid of the logical post-hoc reasoning? I'm not so sure--and we kinda need the logical one for survival.

All animals have this, by the way. Your dog won't stick his paw in the fire either. The big difference between animals and humans with post-hoc reasoning is that we take it to ridiculous lengths. So...get rid of the part of our brains that takes it to ridiculous lengths? That gets rid of our ability to come up with scientific theories--which we may prove right or wrong later, but we need to have that wild post-hoc imagining in order to come up with them at all. So, might not be a good thing to get rid of it.

And how about our need to anthropomorphize. This is part of why we create gods: that tree bark looks like a human face; so that tree must be something human like as well as tree-like, so it can understand us if we talk to it. It might communicate our wishes to the other trees...etc. Why is this a good thing? Well, if we couldn't recognize human elements in animals we wouldn't be kind to them (even if--yet again--this often leads to big mistakes like thinking the bear isn't going to eat us). Our desire to travel to other planets is based, in part, on our belief that another "us" is on them. On seeing a man in the moon.

And, I'm afraid that if we weren't able to create religions or gods we'd also have a real problem when it came to art and literature. No Superman. Because you see, when it gets right down to it, all gods are superhero stories. Stories of beings who have amazing adventures, do amazing things that we want to do, but can't, and who can protect and save us from the scary world. It may not be a good thing for us to imagine such when it comes to organized religion, but I'd really hate to do without Saturday morning cartoons. The part of our imagination leads to gods also leads to other nifty, entertaining and, frankly, enlightening stuff.

Putting it another way, while it's possible for individuals (atheists) to have all this and *not* believe in gods or religion, it's very difficult for humankind as a species to have all this and not create gods or religion. We'd have to be other than what we are to erase religion/gods from the collective human psyche. The only other scenario is getting everyone to keep all this, but to all think like atheists. Which puts us back at sentence #1: you don't get rid of the greed, jealousy, pettiness, aggression, or, alas, stupidity. So, I'm not sure our history would have been that much different. We'd just have been more honest. Instead of saying, "We're going to war to protect god's city from the infidel!" we'd say, "They've got gold, spices, and other good stuff, and we want that." And when we tortured and burned people we wouldn't say "We're saving their souls!" we'd say, "We enjoy watching people tortured and burned to death."

Getting rid of gods and religion doesn't get rid of human nature, just the excuses we use for doing what our human nature wants to do.