@FMF
If it's true that there has never been a coherent human culture without religion, whether theistic or not, then I would probably argue that it's mostly instinctual and the actual beliefs are incidental. If there's now a sense of emerging from this because the current religions are based on narratives 2000 years or more old it's difficult to determine whether this is because the religions have simply reached their natural limits of adaptability. The question is then whether humanity can now be done with them altogether or if they are so necessary to successful human societies that a more "suitable" one will be along shortly.
@FMF
Yes.
I think when you become sceptical of the religion of your birth, you begin to see how the various social and psychological factors (manipulations?) play out in real time and have a sense of how ritual and religious experiences are exchanged for one's fealty.
Can we live in a blind aimless universe without imposing some form of religious narrative on it?
@ragwort saidSome people can; some people can't. In terms of my own moral compass, I cannot separate it from my own religious socialization, despite gradually realizing I was an agnostic atheist in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Can we live in a blind aimless universe without imposing some form of religious narrative on it?
Furthermore, perhaps I should be grateful for my safety [among other things] which is arguably enhanced and guarded by the fact that the culture here where I live has had the Islamic religious narrative "imposed" on it and all the beneficial aspects of social order that come with it.
-Removed-All I am saying is that I live in a well-ordered society. Here, neighborliness and community and certain aspects of decorum seem to me to be rooted in and shaped by religion. If it had not been the case, living here might have been more precarious. I also lived in Japan for a long time and there was order and decorum - and a lack of precariousness - there too, but it was a form of social order that was not so overtly rooted in religious belief, at least not in recent generations, as it is, by Indonesian standards, a "Godless" culture.
@ragwort saidWell, one of the reasons that Christianity is so successful is that much of the moral code it promotes is effective and commonsensical, even without buying into the narratives that make claims regarding supernatural phenomena and beings. This would explain the permanent impact of my own "overtly religious upbringing" regardless of my loss of faith.
It's the psychological and social mechanisms at play here which interest me the most - if only to understand my own overtly religious upbringing in a non supernatural context - and perhaps some of my reactions since.