As an atheist, I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of the factors that made me atheist in a way that would've been not just repugnant, but downright unimaginable, to the previous 20+ generations of my family.
I think the individual rational case for abandoning religious institutions is really compelling. Goodness without gods is obviously possible, and villainy with them as well. The religious machine consumes time and resources and the benefits it yields are ill-defined and diluted by its many harms.
However, theology and religion represent the state-of-the-art of a millennia long effort to establish meaning in the human condition.
Today, many academic disciplines look down upon theology when it was, until very recently, the core of what it meant to be a scientist or thinker - especially in Christian/Muslim/Jewish traditions. It's crazy how many in the social sciences, much less the physical sciences, have never engaged with the religious canons that underpin their disciplines. Not so much the bible stories, as the exegesis that gave birth to academia.
Even for the average person, the Church served as inexpensive frontline mental health care (esp. for bereavement, anxiety, and guilt), a social safety net, a source of community, and a source of simple, generally reasonable, heuristics to evaluate daily decisions. These are all things my "enlightened" post-religious life struggles to provide me.
It's totally fine for society to evolve away from religion. I think faith is in inevitable peril as our understanding of the world grows. However, we may be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater by making the assumption that it is possible to simply skip out on something that sat at the core of most human lives for millennia with no ill effect.
I think the individual rational case for abandoning religious institutions is really compelling. Goodness without gods is obviously possible, and villainy with them as well. The religious machine consumes time and resources and the benefits it yields are ill-defined and diluted by its many harms.
However, theology and religion represent the state-of-the-art of a millennia long effort to establish meaning in the human condition.
Today, many academic disciplines look down upon theology when it was, until very recently, the core of what it meant to be a scientist or thinker - especially in Christian/Muslim/Jewish traditions. It's crazy how many in the social sciences, much less the physical sciences, have never engaged with the religious canons that underpin their disciplines. Not so much the bible stories, as the exegesis that gave birth to academia.
Even for the average person, the Church served as inexpensive frontline mental health care (esp. for bereavement, anxiety, and guilt), a social safety net, a source of community, and a source of simple, generally reasonable, heuristics to evaluate daily decisions. These are all things my "enlightened" post-religious life struggles to provide me.
It's totally fine for society to evolve away from religion. I think faith is in inevitable peril as our understanding of the world grows. However, we may be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater by making the assumption that it is possible to simply skip out on something that sat at the core of most human lives for millennia with no ill effect.