What is the function of religion?

[Hegel]

Not directly, but that's simply a logical consequence of the hypothesis. Your argument is of the same type that creationist do against evolution: you can't show some intermediary stage for them, and thus, they claim, eveolution is crap ... But if evolution is true, then obviously nature has not kept some fossils for us simply to convince the creationist.

Of course, if it is the case that religion has made society really fit, then there should be no non-religious societies.

But if it is as damaging as the New Atheists claim, I wonder why cultural selection has not done away with it?

What I posed is an alternative hypothesis for the New Atheist story, which makes much less sense and is even less testable.

And: I am not trying to convince you to think that religion should or should not exist. It will exist whatever you or me think of it, and trying to bash it, btw, is not the best startegy to get rid of its harmful forms, at least in my opinion.

I'm not making any argument. I'm pointing out that the premise of yours, that all societies have been religious and religion has benefited them, is impossible to prove. You're just making an assertion that you can't back up and exepcting everyone to just accept it.

I was not expecting anyone to accept anything. I just don't take the trash meme hypothesis as given.

The rest of your post is just fallacy ridden nonsense. I mean, if cocaine is so harmful, how come cultural selection hasn't done away with it? Because people don't necessarily choose to engage in activites simply by looking at the benefits or harm they provide.

Perhaps my argument was not the best possible (I am improvising this stuff, you see), but you still miss my point.

Clearly people have tendency to believe in deities etc.
You can correspond that with tendency to develop drug addiction if you want. But that's what man is like. Now what is the proof that religion is simply like a drug, that is has no other functions?

Well, one has no evidence. It is simply assumed, and by doing so, the question concerning the functions of religion is ignored. If you claim it is simply like a drug -- a "brain parasite" -- , you ignore totally the social dimension of the phenomenon, you look it from the point of you of modern individualism.

Religion organizes people into groups,a mong other things; and it also gives them "meaning of life", "spiritual guidance", etc. We know that by fact. And it seems that it is for some reasons the easiest way to do that with the aid of some supernatural stuff, hirarchies of priests, shamans or whatever.

Now, that people are organized into greater groups -- that is adaptive without doubt. Hence, it seems, religion is adaptive.

Perhaps there are no societies without religion because that's the only way, in the first place, to organize men into groups.

But today this seems to be the case no longer in the west. But as it has been the case for the whole bloody human history, am I speaking nonsense, if I ask, when this has been going on only less than a decade, and is far from being accomplished, that nobody can know what the results are? In any case, if religion belongs, or should belong, only to our past, it nevertheless makes no sense to see it simply as a drug.

Rather, the only rational argument is, that now we have something better, but from this standpoint it makes no sense to bash religion and think it as some wort of root of all evil.

And the question remains, as with all development, as whateverist (I think) so well put it, whether one has thrown the child with the washing water. There are loads of examples of such "developments".

So, if you want a society without religion, then you at least should take pains in order to understand religion, not simply take it as "drug", etc.

That's my bloody whole point, in a nutshell.

And as for cocaine and drugs. A society, which does not develop an efficient way of dealing with drugs that are abundant (by controllling access, by ethics of use, etc) is likely to perish. Think religion not as a drug, but as a way of dealing with drugs or the tendency to use drugs. What "drugs", you ask. Well, that's the very problem! What are the problems that religious texts are dealing with?

That's the alternative hypothesis to Dawkinsianism. And: I never claimed Dawkins & al are all wrong; it only seems to me their point of view is limited.

And bashing religion itsn't a strategy to get rid of it. It's a coping mechanism for the fact that I have live with human beings that prefer to push their brand of delusion onto others. If people would learn to keep their fucking religion to themselves, there would be a lot less to bash.

It is more than common that people choose strategies that are not optimal for attaining their goal.