Has Religion been good or bad for humanity? by Harvey Whitehouse
The debate over whether religion makes us better people or brings out our basest instincts has gone on for a long time. In order to try and establish which it is, in 2010 Pieter Francois, Peter Turchin and Harvey Whitehouse began building a history databank. The project was named after the Egyptian goddess of record-keeping, Seshat. The databank currently contains information on more than 400 societies that have existed around the world over the past 10,000 years.
It seems that religions always promoted social cohesion, but how this was achieved depended on the size and nature of human groups. Modern eyes see good and bad religions, but what happened was that in the past people have changed their ideas about what constituted good cooperative behaviours.
For most of pre-history, humans lived in small groups, often on the move, whose members all knew each other. Today such small societies tend to favour infrequent but traumatic rituals that promote social cohesion, for example initiation rites that include scarification.
As people began farming, groups got larger and individuals did not always know everyone else. They did not need to risk everything for one another, so the level of social cohesion needed was lower. They did still feel the need for a group ethos, with a moral code and system of governance, especially when groups merged through military conquest. New kinds of rituals developed; these were usually painless practices like prayer and meeting in holy places.These overcame the free-rider problem and ensured compliance with government. (e.g. Egypt.)
In turn this made them vulnerable to power-hungry rulers. The despotic god-kings raised militias and priesthoods, using practices such as human sacrifice and slavery. However, these states rarely grew beyond 100,000 people, as they in turn became unstable, and more liable to invasion.
Around the middle of the first millennium BC, novel notions of equality altered the relationship between rulers and ruled, stabilising societies and allowing them to grow in size and complexity. A handful of important prophets and spiritual leaders emerged - Buddha, Confucius and Zoraster (Zarathrustra).
Societies that grew to a million or more found a new way to build cooperation, with Big Gods. They demoted their rulers to the status of ordinary people, began to develop democracy and the rule of law, and a more equal distribution of rights and obligations. They began valuing social justice above deference to authority. (e.g. Judaism, Christianity and Islam.)
Today many societies have transferred religions community-building and surveillance roles to secular institutions. Some of the wealthiest and most peaceful have atheist majorities. But these societies also face big problems in absorbing migrants, and containing social tensions and xenophobia. Studying how the different elements of religion have changed our view of civilisation could help us find a way to deal with these issues.
Source: article in New Scientist, 6 April 2019