Is It Possible for Humanity to Create a Peaceful World with Religion in it?

[Excited Penguin]

While my gut would like to answer in the affirmative, reason compels me to be skeptical about my intuition.  I'm curious about other peoples' thoughts on this? Do you think religion is peaceful? Does it ultimately hold us back from creating a peaceful world? Or, even without religion, would we still find ways to be hostile to one another? Can peace be obtained? What is your formula for peace?

Do you think your gut feeling has, perhaps, something to do with our natural tendency to respect and value authority? From there to blind acceptance of such a narrative (involving a supreme authority to watch over and direct human affairs) as religion is but an obvious step. That is why we can't always trust our gut alone, perhaps most saliently in intellectual matters. While having been extremely useful to our survival as a species, the hardware (and software in the case of religion) that comes as part of the package with us humans has been, in many cases, obsoleted by the intellectual and technological progress witnessed in the last few millenia.

 Analytical thought is to be applied on such matters without exception. Feelings, yes, even gut ones, have their place and use in life, that place is not, however, in the anthropologist's toolcase, in my view. I might be wrong, though. I welcome further discussion on this point if we find ourselves in disagreement.

My thoughts are that religion is inherently bad for today's and tomorrow's worlds. By virtue of providing the downtrodden, the less educated and the more credulous among us with unfalsifiable, false and/or mutually exclusive claims about our origins and about the nature of reality it almost always breeds tribal violence, it elevates dogmatism to a virtue and it has the - used and abused in the past- potential to influence not only individuals, but their various organizational structures as well, including but not limited to families, political parties, churches and statal entities. The reach of religion in human affairs is virtually unending; it has pervaded and absorbed countless defining cultural movements and epochal currents of thought; it has been a major cause for human conflict on all scales throughout its history of feeding on the body of our species' civilization, and, one could argue, among other things, it was also ultimately responsible for the successful execution of one of the most hideous and infamous genocidal acts witnessed in modern times due to its relentless campaign of promoting anti-semitic thoughts and feelings among inhabitants of The Old Continent throughout the centuries.

Religion is rotten at its very core. It feeds on suffering, on weaknesses and fears. It negates one's freedom, stunts one's will to live, breaks one's moral compass by limiting its operational scope and inverting its readings' values 180 degrees and dampens one's intellect while also constraining one's creativity - not unlike a gruesome, slow-acting neurological poison.

As for peace, it is an illusory concept. We will always be at war. Strife is the natural state of everything in existence.

Religion has to be removed from the human condition and discourse. It is time for us to upgrade our weaponry to something less fatal and more entertaining.