long winded fool

I'm not trying to advance a theory that atheism is responsible for cultural death. I'm simply pointing out that civilizations with strong religious beliefs have often been the longest lived. And since logic and skepticism certainly aren't new, and there were no known successful secular civilizations, (until America) maybe religion serves an important, even vital function for the survival of civilizations? Removing it could be good, but if it was ever removed in the past, the results mustn’t have been good since there's no record of any atheist civilizations. How can we be so sure that atheism is more beneficial to civilization than religion when no civilization that we know of has ever survived without religion? Are modern people that much wiser than ancient peoples? Are we so sure we know better?

It's said that our high intelligence is what makes man the fittest to survive, but the smarter we get, the more dangerous we seem to be to ourselves. Wisdom is obviously not dependent on practical intelligence and technology, since humans generally considered wiser than most people of this civilization lived in long dead civilizations with less than a tenth of our advanced technology and knowledge of science. Letting religion do your thinking for you, a repulsive phrase nowadays, apparently allows long life of a civilization and balanced population growth and resource consumption. Science has all but eliminated the supernatural in this day and age, but it has yet to gain the control over our civilization that religion had since the very first societies. It may have, in fact, thrown the entire ecosystem into a turmoil from which it may never recover.

Maybe science is better suited than religion in cultivating a healthy civilization, but religion has worked so far. Science hasn't, though we don't know whether it's been tried or not. We may still be experiencing its "birth pains." We'll soon find out which makes humanity "the fittest" to survive, science or religion. So far, religion is in the far lead and science has yet to prove itself even once, (on a scale of surviving civilizations.) Maybe it's tried and failed, maybe it's never even tried, but religion is proven to work perfectly as a cultural backbone, (though there's really no basis for comparison yet.) Can the advances of modern science replace this apparently powerful weapon humanity has always had in its struggle for survival? I hope so! Otherwise, as others have hinted, we'll likely be facing a future mass decline in population of "biblical" proportions.

Clete

Just throwing this out there, but wouldn't China be considered an atheistic culture (or at least an atheistic government)? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like China is much closer to being an atheistic state than the US currently is. So maybe the birth of some kind of enlightened non-religous age will occur over there instead (though they no doubt have a lot of issues to work out first).

-Clete

Brahma's atheist

I doubt that in the past if a civilisation collapsed it had anything to do with atheism. Back in those days the knowledge simply wasn't there for atheism though some people may have concluded there were no gods. More likely is that people would cling more to their gods or turn to other gods. Collapses of societies is to do with invasion, ecodisasters, becoming too big for your boots and other such things, not atheism or science.
Try looking up info on Easter Island and see a textbook societal collpase.
Science merely explains the world.It is not pushing a social stucture.
If a soceties structure is strong then there is no need for religion. Religion is after all simply a bunch of societal rules, morality tales with an ineffective bogey man in control. There are religious laws and societal laws. Losing religion doesn't mean the collapse of your civilisation.

I think the atheism of China is forced on the people.If that constraint wasn't there would they turn to a religion, Buddhism for example?

pilaar

------------------------------------
long winded fool:

Hmm. Good question. But assuming that during the collapse of any organized religion there are more non-believers than there are believers (the definition of religious collapse I'd think,) then logically religious skeptics always outnumber the believers during the last days of a particular religion. There have always been atheists, but never atheistic (or perhaps non-religious is a better term) civilizations. As a matter of history, the wide-scale abandonment of religion is equivalent to the abandonment of society. The death of religion is not a prerequisite to the death of a civilization, but death of the civilization, so far, is a necessary outcome of death of religion.
---------------------------------------

That is just it, I never heard of any civilisation collapsing because of the abandonment of religion in favour of atheism. I am sure that atheists have always been around but as far as I know, the civilisations collapsed because of other reasons, not because people became non-believers in god/s. Civilisations may have been invaded and conquered by another civilisation, others collapsed due to internal rivalry of rulers and so disintegration. Civilisations also collapsed because they used up their resources etc.

But people changed their god-belief systems, they did not became atheists, they just took on another god-system and the old one either evolved to incorporate the new belief system, or it died out completely. So the civilisations have died out due to its people taking on another culture & belief system for whatever reason. And even so, the traces of the old belief system can remain. Eg. Roman Catholic church. Before christianity, European peoples believed in a myriad of gods, well known examples are Romans and Greeks. All other nations had a similar belief system (many gods as opposed to one). After christianity spread (by force in many cases) the old belief system evolved into new one but it still resembles the old in many ways. I know my grandmother, who is a RC, prays to a number of different saints, there is a saint for this and a saint for that, she even decorates the small altar she has at home and offers flowers, candles to them. Every church has statues and paintings of saints. So in many ways even the belief system has not changed all that much, just the names of the gods. And she knows that saints are not equal to father god, but the old system also had a hierarchy of gods. RC churches have many celebrations & rituals which have evolved from the old pagan rituals. They were never abandoned just changed a bit. So in this case, the belief of old civilisation has not collapsed, just changed and evolved.

-------------------------------------
Long winded fool:
It's said that our high intelligence is what makes man the fittest to survive, but the smarter we get, the more dangerous we seem to be to ourselves. Wisdom is obviously not dependent on practical intelligence and technology, since humans generally considered wiser than most people of this civilization lived in long dead civilizations with less than a tenth of our advanced technology and knowledge of science. Letting religion do your thinking for you, a repulsive phrase nowadays, apparently allows long life of a civilization and balanced population growth and resource consumption. Science has all but eliminated the supernatural in this day and age, but it has yet to gain the control over our civilization that religion had since the very first societies. It may have, in fact, thrown the entire ecosystem into a turmoil from which it may never recover
--------------------------------

I don’t agree with what you are saying because this assumption is based on the premise that science is a recent development and that it has no connections to the past. The science & technology of today are a culmination of the knowledge, advancement and the inventions of the past. Eg. the foundations for atomic bomb have been laid down in the past, inventors basically combine the accumulated knowledge, combine it together and also come up with some new discoveries.
The science, its tools and inventions are not a recent discovery. Basically, we are living in the age where the knowledge of the past has culminated, the development of technology has enabled us to have easy access to the information & technology, to build the weapons of mass distruction, the combination of knowledge and medicine gives children a better chance of survival etc. So we have the overpopulation problem. But our generation has not on its own created the overpopulation, the population steadily grew over the centuries (with some setbacks), we just happen to live in a time when the population numbers have become a problem. The large population we are dealing with today is the result of the activities of the past. The industrial revolution and the environmental damage has been culminating over the centuries.
What would the industrial revolution be without a wheel which was invented centuries ago?

Some areas arebetter now than in the past. Eg. there are now more trees in Europe than 500 years ago. And I don't think that ecology has much to do with religion. I am sure that there are a number of christians who are concerned and involved with ecological movement, but there is even a larger part of christians who have no interst in ecology. I know that many ecologists believe that christianity is a contributing factor to the destruction of ecology, because it supports the belief that humans have to rule over and dominate the creation. Because of the belief that everything has been created to 'serve' the humans. And because of the belief that this world does not matter much, it is the 'other world' believers have to concern themselves with. Most of the ecologists I know are not religious, quite the opposite. You will also find that it is the non-believers who are concerned about the overpopulation. On the other hand, the religious tend to be anti population control and planning. So perhaps here in the ‘western civilisation’ we have a problem with our current religion, its teachings and its ideas. And not with atheism.
I don't believe that people were wiser on the whole in the past. Would the rules of the past say no to the weapons of today had they a chance to purchase them? Would farmers of the past say no to the technology of today had they a chance to purchase it?


----------------------------------------------
How can we be so sure that atheism is more beneficial to civilization than religion when no civilization that we know of has ever survived without religion? Are modern people that much wiser than ancient peoples? Are we so sure we know better?
-----------------------------------------------

Don’t know the answer. I guess we will have to wait and see.


pilaar

PS. Sorry for my English, it is my second language.

pilaar

I know that christian religion claims that it has done away with infanticide. But this is also dependent on the science, invention and technology. Here's an intersting example.
Many peoples in the past had to use infanticide as a form of population control to insure the survival of the tribe. They could only support a certain number of people. Due to the technological advancements especially in agriculture, we can now produce more on a smaller area of land and we can support many more people than in the past. So infanticide has become unecessary with the development and the religion which prohibits it can also arise. Eg. Aboriginal people of Australia have used infanticide as population control in the past, their religion allowed for it. And they survived for centuries. But imagine if they spontaneously changed to religion which prohibited infanticide and at the same time they would not have been given an access to any new ways of producing food & hunting for food and no new land to conquer. How long would they survive and how long would their culture & civilisation last?

pilaar

long winded fool

You make some valid points. Perhaps the fact that we've never heard of any non-religious civilizations means that none were ever tried. Or perhaps they were tried and none were successful enough to grow into a civilization. Or maybe there were successful atheist civilizations that simply haven't been discovered. Perhaps, (hopefully) "science and reason" are finally taking the place of traditional "religion and superstition." Men of the western civilization are resilient. I'm sure they'll be able to survive the transplant of their societal backbone. What the civilization will look like after is anybody's guess, but men will survive.

Christian religious beliefs are not anti-population control. They're simply against many of the options humans have of controlling population. If the Aborigines spontaneously became good Christians, they'd have to institute their marriage rituals and strict rules on sexual intercourse. Who's to say the Christian idea of population control is any less effective than the Aboriginals’? Everyone is against some form of population control. Even though I'm sure Nazi Germany was miserable and would have benefited greatly from population control, I still think they ought not to have controlled their population the way they did. The religious tend to believe in chastity until marriage and tend to frown on divorce. What do you suppose is the current percentage of children conceived out of wedlock? I think these things would go a long way towards population control without legalizing the murder of a select group of humans. Of course, they aren't enforceable and laws simply allowing a human to kill another require nothing to enforce. Unfortunately, legal abortions will never be near enough to curb the population increase of the world, even when combined with the constant tribal warfare we're so fond of. And so it goes into the next millennia.

While perfect religion could theoretically bring mankind out of his sins and raise him up to heaven, perfect reason could bring him out of his instincts and put him in total control of his environment and his destiny. Perhaps these two things aren't as diametrically opposed as we think? I think they are fundamentally the same thing. They certainly must serve the same purpose as far as a civilization is concerned. After all, isn't sinning always just falling prey to a basic instinct of fear or lust? There's no difference between true religion and true science. Both seek knowledge for the good of the human race, and both are misused to the detriment of it. A perfect atheist is no different than a perfect Christian (or Jew or Buddhist...) Both tell us to ignore our instincts in favor of reason. It's all those imperfect people that give us cause to doubt one and champion the other.