I am not denying that religion is also the source of many conflicts. Anything can be misused. Even science and technology are misused. It depends on the people and their stage of development. Science and technology have perhaps ruined our planet more than religions ever have.
Science and technology cannot be 'misused', because they claim no inherent morality or purpose. They are discoveries of the underlying mechanisms and patterns of the universe, and the applications of those learnings.
Similarly, religions cannot be 'misused', because there is no definitive 'use' in any of them: they are all subjective interpretations, and the ones that have survived best are the ones that are vague enough to lend themselves to multiple interpretation to weather storms of reality and knowledge. Religion is not something that can be applied, religion is the result of the collective application of faith.
We must remember that we humans develop beginning with base animal urges... moving to emotional faculties... and then to intellectual faculties. Our need to discipline ourselves also therefore moves in the same direction....from base urges to emotional needs to intellectual needs.
That sounds wonderful. I fail to see how following fairy-tales does that.
Religions have helped us to control these aspects of ourselves in various ways for centuries. I cannot imagine a situation where religions did not at all exist.
No, they haven't. Religions have suppressed aspects in favour of conformity - sometimes to reasonable suggestions, sometimes to arbitrary crap, sometimes to tribal nonsense of their origin location and time. Maturity doesn't come from following rules because they are there, maturity comes from understanding the underlying principles that guide the rules and realising which ones are worthy and rewriting those that aren't.
Just imagine no Ten Commandments, no Jesus and his teachings, no Mohammad and his teachings, no Hindu scriptures, no Mahavira teachings, no Buddha teachings. No temples, no churches, no mosques. No Christmas, no Diwali, no Ramzan....!
Shame to lose the architecture, perhaps, but I suspect that in the absence of religious motivation people would have found other reasons to express themselves. The underlying principles of moral behaviour would still emerge, because they have done so despite the presence of these religions claiming ownership of morality.
We would have still been savages and remained separated by animal urges and petty emotional tangles.
You have no way to know that, definitively, and I have no reason to believe it. Religion is an intrinsic part of history, but I see no reason to presume that it's necessary for our development or all societies that moved past religion would have stagnated, when in fact they are the happiest, most developed, most equitable, most moral societies we have.
Even science and philosophy have been possible only because we have managed to discipline our first and second faculties to a large extent and thereby managed to develop our intellectual faculties.
Right. Is that because of religion, despite religion or regardless of it?
Obviously, all individuals will not develop together or even in sync with one another. Different communities will develop at different rates and individuals within communities will also develop at different rates. But in the long run many if not most individuals will manage to develop in that order. We can see that it has already happened.
Yes, we can see that it's happened. And where it's happened most is where religion is being discarded as unnecessary at best, actively deleterious at worst.
Of course many will still be at the emotional stage and some even at the base stage. This is to be expected.
Not really. We have global communication, we have the capacity to teach, but we are being stymied by 'tradition' and 'culture' - religion.
IMO.... religions have therefore been very useful in making us develop using such things as morality, rules, discipline, social order and self control. They have been Nature's (God's?) tools in making us evolve culturally, emotionally and intellectually.
Religion has been very useful in developing close-knit communities, tribal support mechanism and the like. It has, however, also been useful in controlling large segments of the populace, maintaining imbalanced power systems, institutional misogyny, homophobia, racism, caste systems, slavery, arbitrary social exclusions and wars.
O.
