Garrett wrote:
I have an idea, not sure how to support it and I don't know where I got it from, but it has had no chance to be heard anywhere I've tried to express it.
Religion is a huge part of how pre-historic people bound together into tribes, its a foundation of civilization.
That doesn't mean we can't outgrow it, but it does mean its ignorant to hate religion or to think religion is evil.
It is true that as a cultural function, religions (as a whole aspect) serve to bring together disparate factions, ethnicities, and age-groups toward a common world-view. I don't know that I'd say that it is a '
foundation' of civilization, but it definitely is a powerful
tool. (Look to the Shang culture of China for a civilization w/out religion - ancestor worship, yes, but centralized religion, no.)
These aspects of a culture are important since they can induce people to self-police due to either a specific code of ethics embodied in the religion's cosmogony, or due to the supernatural (or even physical) sanctions that the supernatural (or their followers) may enact, either in the immediate future or in an afterlife. This sort of control on people's actions are extremely powerful, but in this way, not necessarily evil,
per se.
Unfortunately, many of the items and injunctions in the codes of ethics are interwoven into the cultures (and times) from which they were built and codified. Thus, we are, in many ways, correct in viewing many religions as being antiquated and not appropriate for our modern world.
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