What would a world without religion look like?

brian t www

If you mean no religion throughout history, then I would really find it difficult to say. I’m studying Structural Engineering with Architecture, and I can see how Religion has shaped the architecture we see. Cathedrals, mosques, temples etc. area long-established part of the “Designed Environment” we see around us.

It has shaped our development as a species, hindering and helping at different times. Scientific discoveries in Arabia, a thousand years ago, were made under the patronage of Muslim authorities, but could not be shared with Western scholars due to religious differences. Much of that progress was lost when Islam turned totalitarian, which was at least partly due to the Crusades. We call those years the Dark Ages, when nearly all learning was suppressed; the Renaissance could have taken place 500 or more years earlier, and where would we be now?

That is just speculation, and could be totally off-base. It is possible to argue that the human race would not have developed as it did without religion, that it played a role in the development of language, while new research suggests that religion may be a product of evolution, anyway . The history is not known exactly, and may never be, with regional variations in there too. Africa is the birthplace of mankind, and for most of the history of that region, there was no religion in the sense we use – but there were still ancestral tales of gods, creation myths, and superstitions that shaped the cultures.

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logicel

Would the world be a better place without Religion? To borrow from the most excellent BlasphemyBaby: Kinda

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