For most of the time human beings have existed, we did just fine without religion. It’s a pretty recent invention, as cultural innovations go, and the need for it simply didn’t exist before.
Why not?
Until about 12,000 years ago, human being existed in very small communities – traveling groups of a hundred people or so. Everyone knew everyone else, from birth till death (which came all too quickly in predator-filled Africa); everyone was kin, to some degree, and each member of the tribe was family-familiar. We lived and died together, in those days.
Consequently, it would have been next to impossible to get away with bad behavior: in such small groups, it was not difficult to hold everyone to account. And there was great incentive to offer the group our very best efforts.
Put another way, Nature imbued early human society (2,500 centuries of it) with community that equaled, and probably far surpassed, the fellowship and moral behaviors we loosely associate with religious communities today.
What changed? Why did we go from implicitly spiritual communities to explicitly religious ones?
It turns out, per Canadian psychologist Azim Shariff, that religion emerged as a "cultural innovation" that was an effective fix to a sudden and serious problem.
When the earth warmed at the end of the last Ice Age cycle, and new mutant grasses brought about the beginnings of agriculture, human communities ceased to be nomadic and began to settle in fixed locations. Until that time, the traveling groups of 100 or so had been in perfect social balance, because the number of people in a human tribe was more or less the number of relationships the human cortex can intellectually and emotionally process effectively. (This number is called Dunbar's Number, and applies to all higher primate species.)
But with fixed communities, that number began to grow much higher - to 200, 500, even 1,000 members, several thousands of years before the first modest city-states emerged. With populations like those, it was no longer possible to know every individual in the community like family. It was possible to walk alongside a complete stranger - something that had never before occurred.
Before fixed human communities, trust between community members was a given; when fixed communities appeared, trust became much, much shakier.
Individuals could now cheat the group, in terms of taking more than their share, or shirking responsibility, or failing to abide by the standards that kept communities safe from predators. There were no all-seeing individuals to catch acts of malfeasance, and no means of punishing perpetrators.
And into this vacuum, Shariff suggests, stepped religion.
Problems with cheaters? Apparent, and growing. Able to observe and intervene? Not nearly enough. Punish them? Some, but not nearly all.
The "cultural innovation", Shariff asserts, is the creation of an all-knowing punisher or two. Or three. Or more, depending on the community. An omniscient, omnipotent enforcer to stem the tide of theft and malfeasance: God(s).
Not surprisingly, this turned out to be exceedingly effective, at least where the original intent goes: having a religion in place enforces conformity to social behavioral standards in the society that adheres to it. 'Trust' becomes a matter of religious identity; if an individual unknown to me approaches, but demonstrates membership in the religion I embrace, I confer trust upon that individual by default.
It goes without saying that this 'trust' is as flimsy as swimwear in the Bahamas, but it works at least somewhat reliably for the purposes intended. When communities began to trade with other communities, the emergence of commerce was softened by religious markers. Expectations of fairness and honesty, based on religious identity displays, increased the efficacy of trade and the spread of the religion. It became easier to deal with strangers and expect an equitable outcome.
The serpent in the garden, Shariff goes on to point out, is that this dynamic can backfire: if we are conditioned to inherently trust an individual we don't know who is of our religion, we are conversely conditioned to suspect (and even reject) an individual who is not, despite their actual level of trustworthiness. In other words, religious markers as a 'trust' cue have replaced actual trust cues. And, of course, we trip right over that phenomenon every single morning of every single day, the instant we glance at our news feeds.
Now distrust has surpassed trust in the equation of human interaction. Now we have wars.
Dominance. Inequality. Bigotry.
Is all of this a consequence of religion? No, of course not; it is not the fault of religion that human communities grew beyond the capacity of our minds to manage them; it is not the fault of religion that its practitioners seldom have the knowledge or experience to distinguish between conferred trust and actual trust. But the religions of the world, both ancient and modern - or more specifically, their leaders - have much to answer for, having learned the trust equation and exploited it, not for the good of the community but for darker agendas. It's one thing to misappropriate trust; it's another to cultivate distrust. The former absconds with the fruits of the human collective; the other destroys it altogether.
And where is 'God' in all of this? Where He's always been: in the voice and schemes and desires of his spokesmen, imposing His will - diminishing and weakening those He was invented to save, eroding the goodness and potential of the souls that gave Him birth.
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