What If… There Were No Religions?

I WAS READING the comment trail for an article I wrote recently entitled “Alien Anthropology: Religion Is Dead But Faith May Yet Prevail” when it sparked off a few chaotic thoughts in my noggin and got me thinking about a hypothetical scenario. It’s a simple enough question to ask, but the implications for any answer are likely to be far reaching and widely debated.

I’m not looking to evolve a perfect answer here folks, but I do think it might be interesting to see what perspectives you can bring to this topic, so please do feel free to comment on it. And so to the question at hand…

What if there were no religions?

Imagine a world without religion, any religion; what would it be like? Not a world where religions suddenly ceased to exist, rather a scenario where they never began in the first place. Would we be better or worse off as a result?

Please don’t just run to your comfortable corners with this one folks and spew out any practiced positions if you can avoid it, rather take some time to examine the possible implications and then let rip with your views. To kick things off here are my initial thoughts on the subject.

I decided to look at some key topics and examine if they would be significantly changed or not in light of the hypothesis and to be honest (speaking as an agnostic) I was quite surprised by the results myself because I would have predicted a completely different outcome… Read more