[frereubu]

The thing that really worries me about these kinds of beliefs in some kind of a god or gods is that they can provide a get-out clause for existential risks to humanity. If this physical universe is just one manifestation of existence, then there's less to worry about because there will be some kind of existence afterwards if you screw it up. But in my view the universe is all there is, and it very definitely doesn't "care" if humanity cooks the planet in a way that makes human life impossible. If that's your view, the first priority of every single person should be to work towards stabilising the climate and reduce our impact on the enviromnent, but instead we have shiny-eyed millenarians piling billions of dollars into things like AI that could be much more productively used in funding an energy transition. (And don't get me started on the idea that AI will help that transition - we already know what we need to do, that isn't complicated, even if the route is complex).

[hattmall]

>If that's your view, the first priority of every single person should be to work towards stabilising the climate and reduce our impact on the enviromnent

But why though? If that's what you believe and there's nothing more, we know the sun is going to explode and destroy everything and an asteroid impact is likely to happen that destroys even sooner than that, so why does that matter?

[frereubu]

Because we could cook the planet in a matter of decades or centuries rather than waiting ~5 billion years for the sun to explode, which would give us plenty of time to figure out how to explore space sustainably rather than some kind of delusional Musk-like sci-fi fantasy of bases on Mars in the next decade.

[NalNezumi]

I think you're missing the historical context of how the "life after death" idea served as an utility, in many religions.

We today have laws and moral separated from religion and institutions that both teaches it to the young citizen and uphold it. But that wasn't the case for vast majority of the history.

How would you convince a tribal person that can't perceive something beyond "good for me & my family/tribe is all justifications required" to act collaboratively beyond that view? Especially if that attitude is also causing suboptimal behavior around him.

Introduce the concept of "good behavior" but there's no guarantee he will follow. Even if you introduced law & punishment you really have no efficient way to enforce it, back in the days.

So you introduce the idea that "if you behave bad,(or your children does) you'll suffer beyond your death".

Just so happen this simple yet powerful idea don't really scale with a complex world

[Gud]

This is a naive world view. Religion became a tool for the powerful to suppress the masses. I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story.

I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about.

But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing.

People are wired to follow their leaders.

[NalNezumi]

I don't follow how your take is any different? We're essentially saying the same thing: it's a "nice story" == easier to sell to people for the powerful to control them.

Organized religion is pretty much about manipulating our innate spiritual side with nice stories to keep us bought in to the "nice story" that serve the top the most.

I'm just pointing out that the utility of the idea is just that: organization and control. It is quite redundant today because there are more advanced way of doing the same thing.

Or are you just pointing out that things have to be argued in a cynical way for it to be true?

[dosssman]

> This is a naive world view. Religion became a tool for the powerful to suppress the masses. I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story.

It is hardly a naive world view. It is instead grounded in reality and the evolutionary luggage of humans and its various consequences on our cultures. We all probably agree, but there seems to be a misunderstanding of the grand parent's comment. Namely, you stated that "Religion became a tool ...", but what GP is referring to is "before it became such tool, what was it ?"

> "I doubt it was ever "for the good of the tribal man", although it's a nice story." I think both GP and I will agree. It is not "for the good of the tribal man", at the same time it does not imply the other alternative that you seem to suggest: "for the benefit of the ruler class".

For example, the selfish gene theory offers a compelling explanation that will not only fit both perspective ("good for tribal man / tribe", "good for ruler"), but also provide insight to similar cultural aspects such as religion, patriotism, to only cite a few. Namely, genes influence their containers, i.e. "survival machines" (SV) in their environment, and natural selection favors genes that induce behaviors leading to increasing the number of copies of said genes in the population. Compared to other animals, humans evolved a complex social dimension as part of their behavior.

Among the various "humans" populations (probably even more distant ancestors), the genes that led to the heuristic behavior of "follow the elders / leaders of the tribe" happen to grant a differential survival advantage to its carriers: indeed, the elder is an "elder" in virtue of having living long, and more generally, a "leader" is such in virtue of having lived long enough and gathered large social and "financial" capital. So "follow the elders / leaders of the tribe" is a useful rule for you to survive. Over time, the gene becomes spread through the general population.

Due to the inability of our ancestors to properly establish causal relationship, while passing "useful rules for survival of the group" , they also happened to pass a lot of superstition and irrational principles, namely because they failed at establishing causal relationship ("is the crop yield bad because I looked wrong at the sun god statue ?" and so on). Those rules are "simple", easy to follow for the tribal man, and to make matters worse, his genes have likely conditioned him to follow those rules (mostly) unquestioned anyway. Whether we like it or not, the rule of "behave well now for a better life after death" was useful at the time, at a surface level for both the "tribal man" but also his "powerful people / leader", and at a deeper level for their shared genes.

Like many other "heuristics" for decision-making that humanity has carried over, it is not immune from exploitation from "more selfish", "mutant" actor: snake oils salesman, politicians promising easy solution to what are actually difficult problems. Religion might have at some point been useful for the good of the tribal man, and incidentally his tribe leaders, which only reinforced the pattern, but the evolutionary blueprints these religion rides on now get exploited by what we nowadays call "powerful people", as you say: > But powerful people(like Peter Thiel) have throughout history enforced their own fucked up world views on the rest of us, via indoctrination and blunt force. It's still ongoing. > People are wired to follow their leaders. But it is not just a matter of indoctrination and blunt force, it is unfortunately a matter of predisposition of the human mind. But the leaders have not "wired" them, they are just plugging into already existing circuits, and channeling their current to enact their desired outcomes (however perverted they may be).

To leave on a optimistic note, by a chain of serendipitous events, despite religions dominating not so long ago, secularism has somehow emerged and helped us separate the wheat from the chaff in many aspects of our lives. As humans, we already have come a long way in untangling our messy evolutionary baggage and the various side effect of natural selection of genes and their extended behaviors (religion, culture, etc...) Just as how we have to upset the genes' goals through methods such as contraception, there is no reason why we couldn't free ourselves from their other machinations.

> I believe most people have an innate spiritual side, questioning our roles in the universe and what life is really all about.

I think this statement suggest a confusion / mix-match of philosophical, moral and ethical questions that are still grounded in the material world, and "spiritual" that are by most common definitions pertaining to super natural assumption (intangible human soul never measured so far). If anything, deeper examination suggests that religion hardly helps much when it comes to those grand questions either. Most people probably have the capacity to question the "why" and other such questions, but not all necessarily them have the luxury of exercising it.

[rich_sasha]

I'm not sure you can blame this on deities. Nazis and Stalinists (especially the latter) were very atheistic. Both at some level thought they're building a better world, literally by murdering millions of people and enslaving orders of magnitude more.

[JamesTRexx]

Religion is just one of the excuses/covers used to grab more power and/or shiny baubles by psychopatic people. And there are the ones who just want to see others suffer no matter what. Most of the people that are left don't feel like lifting a finger unless it directly endangers their own comfortable life.

Call me cynical, but I haven't seen any improvement in human nature in 50 years.