Can humanity be improved without religion?

[TSherbs]

This question was asked on another thread that was on a different topic. I declined to go further off-topic at that point in that thread, but the question did resonate with me, so I thought that I would give an answer in its own proper thread.

So, Can humanity be improved without religion? Or, asked a different way, how can humanity find the values and motivation to direct itself toward being better persons? Or maybe even more bluntly, How does atheism have standards and a desire for betterment?

My answer (quckly composed):

I am sure that there are books and books about this written by very smart and learned persons. I have not read any of them. Nor did I just now go to any summary pages on the topic for a prompt. I am just going to give my response off the top of my head from what I am thinking this day, March 21, 2023.

1) The biggest benefit that atheism (removing religion from the world) gives is that it is not based upon a lie. So the first benefit, I would suggest, is that the world without religions would be a world in which its elders and leaders do not lie to its followers and younger persons. This massive pratice of lying, from this point of view, is a massive pattern of psychological and intellectual abuse of the credulous. A world is better, I would argue, without that fundamental abusive relationship.

2) Accepting that there is no god(s), no permanent values, no life after death, no spirits roaming the world and watching over us or influencing our behaviors, nothing but a life and then eternal extinction is a form of intellectual, psychological, and spiritual maturity. And the more mature that we ask ourselves and our culture to be, the better. Maturity is a form of growth, and we should all strive to reach this stage and promote it in our houses and our culture.

3) This maturity comes from accepting that ALL our behaviors and decisions and ethics and guidelines are OUR RESPONSIBILITY (individuallly and collectively), and no one else's (no god's or spirit's). WE have to do the hard work of confronting our essential brief existence and construct ENTIRELY its purpose and meaning WITHOUT LYING TO OURSELVES about a purpose or meaning coming from a fictional spirit world. This is what parents, in their weakness, tells to children. This is not what a mature society should do with its citizenry.

4) Some of this is based on my understanding (superficial) of existentialism, which I have a strong affinity for. Let me summarize, off the top of my head, what I can about existentialism and its core tenets in relation to this question:

a) There is no God
b) Life is suffering (full of struggle, full of pain, and brief)
c) Hoping that God will change (b) leads to more anguish and suffering (dissillusionment)
d) Suicide is unnacceptable (cowardice)
e) Therefore, one must accept full responsibility for making/creating the meaning of one's existentence entirely from materials at hand and not from any supernatural realm.


5) Asking the world to be this mature about owning full responsibility for its values, its decisions, its behaviors is one important step to allowing it to grow beyond its iron-age mythology and beliefs that have been a cowardly panacea for the anguish of asking the universe and the forces of the world "Why?" and getting NO ANSWER. But instead of having the courage to face the void of no reply (because there is no God), we have traditionally made up the spiritual authority to give us rules and to give us messages of succor to help us deal with this pain of aloneness in the universe (separated from a cosmic parent) as if we were children. If one's claim is that the world can never come to some basic agreements about values and ethics (of course we can; it has already been done) without an all powerful god to punish transgressors and reward the orthodox, then one simply wants us to remain in the mindset of a child lied to by its elders in an abusive and manipulative arrangement.


-----These responses aren't an actual *plan* for how to run the planet, nor do I have the *answer* for what values should come first, second, third, etc. Many groups, many religions, many writers over the millenia have already done this. Of course we can do it without religion. Even the Humanist Society has already done this. It would just take mature courage. Who knows, it might even result, after the pain of dissilusionment, in a more real form of universal love. Because all we have is us, not an iota more.