(June 21, 2015 at 12:53 pm)Nope Wrote: I haven't read anyone's answer yet so what I write might have already been said.
Some personality types need to believe in some authority. I dont know why. Perhaps it makes life easier for them if the rules are clear cut, black and white.
Without religion, those same people would try to find some new authority to guide them. No, I don't think the world would be a better place without religion unless we figure out how to cure people from wanting easy answers about morality.
I have heard that many times before (though not in this thread). But I think it is false. I think it is something that is artificially generated, that people have that and are told that they need it, so they believe that they need it. I do not think that people inherently need any such thing. People who thought they needed such things who lose their religion seem to not have the problems that they imagined (when they were still religious) that they would have in such a situation.
(June 21, 2015 at 12:53 pm)Nope Wrote: There is also a tendency in all of us to put ourselves and others in groups. Our group is obviously the good one while other groups have different degrees of wrongness with them. Religion can be used to separate people but the same thing is true of strongly held political views. If you read comments under some news articles, you can see how people shout down each other with words like feminists, atheists, liberals, conservatives etc. Once those words are used, the writer feels that he or she can stop reading anything that the other person said because the other person belongs to one of the bad groups. If religion disappeared, people would still try to put each other into neatly defined groups so they can hate and hurt one another.
See my post above, posted shortly after your post.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
