Furthermore if you are going to make blanket statements about "traditional religion" then you do have to include religions such as the Aztec religion (which did produce some nice art, etc) and others, and you also have to take account of societies that had no religion and seemed to get on fine without it.
Sure, I never said religion was the ONLY stabilizing institution humanity has come up with, just one of them.
Bottom line: can you say that "traditional religion" has resulted in a net benefit compared to the possible alternatives?
This wasn't even the subject of my point. My point was merely that one has to engage with historical and sociological forces to understand where we are today and where we could go. It would have been great if humanity had been mature enough to not need religion, but it wasn't. In most parts of the world today it still isn't. People STILL need religion, fixed beliefs, dogmas, etc. for emotional stability, social cohesion, etc. etc. For me it's a waste of time to work out these "what-if" scenarios -- what happened, happened. We have to make meaning out of our human mistakes and move on.
I am not sure that the fact that religion is a form of social control is a positive thing. Perhaps it was necessary or seen as necessary once upon a time ...
Yeah, that's all I'm saying. It was necessary once upon a time, in a premodern age, where the experience of the *individual* did not exist the way it does in the modern and postmodern age. Not only religion, but monarchy, hierarchy, etc. etc. provided a moral and social structure in a world where people did not experience themselves as individuals and did not have the luxury to be self-reflective. That age is obviously gone as there is a mass democratization underway now.
Regardless of whether religion is man-made or not, humanity derived morals from it.
Uh?
IF: religion is man-made
THEN: the moral teachings found in religion are man-made
So how could humanity derive morals from morals that derived from humanity?
Unless you use the word "deriving" in a very loose and strange way.
Then you could say things like: the author of a book "derives" ideas from the book he has just finished writing.
That is exactly the point I was trying to make. It's a circular argument.
It wasn't even an argument, just an observation. Human beings set up institutions to help them stabilize societies and cultures. Religion is one of them. Governments are another. Religion played this kind of stabilizing, unifying, moralizing role in the past. One can criticize religion today while acknowledging that it may have been necessary for humanity *in the past* -- I don't understand why you guys are being so oppositional to this. It's not like I am saying we should all convert to traditional religions, nor am I saying we should encourage traditional religions to persist or to resist change.
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