| Ji99saw said: If you are acknowledging the fact that Religion shaped society and human history today then how can the absence of it completely not have harmful effect. The origins,lessons and teachings of religions have to be reinforced and taught forever or they will be forgotten and the moral ground that modern society stands upon will collapse. It's like riding a bike and forgetting how to walk, or learning multiplication but forgetting addition.By the way name one modern civilization that does not have a strong religious emphasis. |
Religious was pretty ubiquitous in ancient cultures because they didn't understand things so they wanted some way to explain things that they didn't understand, so just about every society has been pretty steeped in religious. That goes for all of them though to the ones that laid the ground work for the societies we have today to the ones that really have no part in our current moral structure like the Mayans and their human sacrifice or smaller tribes that ate people. Sure you can't come up with a society that flourished without religion, but I doubt you could come up with an example of a society that died without religion either. Simple fact is that every ancient society was steeped in religion.
Also you're basically looking at a bunch of societies that had a religion ond a moral structure and assuming that religion came first, but I think you'd have a tough time proving that. Sure religion and moral structure are almost inextricably linked in ancient societies, but that doesn't mean that without religion there would be no moral structure, you're seeing a corellation and assuming a causation.
OT: y'know religion has been around for so long that I just don't think we can possibly know whether or not it's a necessity for a successful society, but I'd be interested in trying.
Almost forgot but a disclaimer should be here. I am not an anthropologist and therefore I might be mistaken about there being no known ancient societies that weren't steeped in religion. If that's not the case I'd be interested in hearing about it.
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