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Sure, but that is hard because religion is such a big part of our history. There aren't many large scale things from the past you can describe without talking a
by efdee 3y ago
Sure, but that is hard because religion is such a big part of our history. There aren't many large scale things from the past you can describe without talking about the influence of religion, because well, religion was there and it was pretty prominent.
However, that doesn't say much about whether religion was necessary for morality to substantiate. In fact, so many immoral things have been carried out in the name of religion, that you might as well wonder if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion.
- keiferski 3y ago> if we would have been much more morally advanced by now if it hadn't been for religion. Kind of an unanswerable question, but I think my tentative answer is "not really." Mostly because the moral viewpoints that underly atheistic criticisms of (usually Christian) religion tend to themselves be derived from earlier Christian ideas. I don't think it's likely that we'd have a universalist sense of democracy/human life without the underlying Christian soul concept. The Romans, for example, had no qualms about human life being divided into "valuable" and "not valuable" groups. You could use the criticisms of someone like Nietzsche against Christianity and say we'd be more advanced without it, but I don't think this is probably the type of "advanced" that most people today would have it mind.