Jobar

...and of course, a deep, deep bow to the memory of John Lennon.

Lately we've had a rash of people who insist that because many of us spend lots of time on Internet Infidels, this means atheism is a religion. Today while I was thinking about this, I turned on the radio and caught the last verse of Lennon's "Imagine"- and the idea for this thread appeared in an instant.

What if human beings had no religion? Would anything even remotely resembling II exist?

Well, obviously, we'd have no EoG, no GRD, and no E/C. No NARP, no SL (certainly not by that name), no C-SS, and no PA&SA. Freethought humor, gone.

But that doesn't mean that there would be no discussion boards dedicated to deep thoughts and big questions. I'm sure that we would have Politics, and Philosophy, and Science, and Technology to talk about. I know people would want to chat about their daily lives, and exchange jokes, and talk music, movies, and art.

As long as humans don't know all the answers to all questions, and there was technology to allow mass communication, there would be discussion boards dedicated to allowing ordinary people to talk about extraordinary things. (Vice versa, too, certainly- extraordinary people would sometimes want to talk about ordinary things.)

In the world as it is, the people who want to address the biggest ideas must be cognizant of, and conversant in, the various religions with which humanity has attempted to answer the largest questions. What are we? How did we get here? How did the world begin? What should we do? All those were originally the sole domain of religion. But even if religion never existed, even if humans somehow jumped straight to a worldview based on rationality and reality, those and many other vast questions would still be asked. So I can't see any reason why boards vaguely like II would not exist.

No one here denies that we unbelievers talk about belief a lot, more than most believers do in fact. But that's because the big questions have been asked and answered in religious terms, until the past few hundred years. It might be possible for us to maintain a board dedicated to ultimate ideas and questions, and forbid even the mention of things religious- but can you imagine how difficult that would be, given the ubiquitous presence of proselytizing believers? Forbidding the mention of things religious would require ridiculously stringent oversight, and would in itself close out questions about huge areas of human experience. So instead of doing that, we meet all theological questions as head on as we can- in hopes that some great day there will be a discussion board about the biggest of questions and their answers, which can safely and comfortably ignore the insanities of ancient mistakes.

Does anyone else want to see how far their imagination will stretch, and offer their dreams of what a religionless II would look like?

Chris Weimer

A world without religion would not work, even if every believer died this very instance, someone would always come up with crazy stuff.

However, if the "God Gene" never developped in humans, I can say that this world would be much, much better off.

Jobar

There's a science fiction writer, James Blish, who wrote a short novel called A Case of Conscience back in 1958. it's a tale about a priest who encounters an alien society- intelligent reptile analogues- which appeared to have no religious practices at all. Their society was purely secular, and when they were discovered by human spaceships, they responded to human religion with disbelief and mild contempt.

Blish was a devout Catholic; the climax of the tale was when the priest, after becoming convinced that the world of the aliens was a pure deception from Satan, performed an exorcism on the whole planet. Which then blew up. (Of course, there was a parallel plot line concerning the dangerous experiments being carried out on the planet, against the native's protests, by human scientists, which could have caused the destruction of the planet.)

I read that story about the same time I became an atheist (circa 1970). The idea of a religion-free society is not by any means new. Though I have no notion how we might get to such a thing, from where we are now. cweb, you may be right, and it's simply impossible...

But hey, we can imagine- like Lennon!