From the past to the present, is religion an essential element of human unity?

Religion has played an important role in uniting humanity through belief in a superhuman order. Even in modern times, religion continues to influence society in various forms, acting as the glue that holds humanity together.

 

The compatibility of science and religion has been a matter of great debate for centuries, and there are countless famous events in history where the two forces have clashed. Many influential scientists of the modern era are also at odds with science and religion and emphasize the negative effects of religion. For example, Richard Dawkins has argued that religion is a kind of mental virus that turns people into murderous weapons because of its obsession with the afterlife. From the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries to 9/11 in modern times, religion has certainly caused a lot of conflict and sacrifice. Even the current global confrontation with the Islamic State and its terrorism is rooted in religion. There’s no denying that religion is the cause of many conflicts. But is religion simply a deadly virus that we need to get rid of? What would have happened if religion had never arisen in the first place? I would argue that the result would have been a failure of human unity.
What is religion? Renowned anthropologist and historian Yuval Noah Harari defines religion as “a system of human norms and values based on a belief in a supernatural order. The beginning of the history of religion is unclear. The prevailing theory is that religion emerged with the transition to agricultural societies around 11,000 years ago, but the exact date of its first appearance is still unclear until 1994, when archaeologist Klaus Schmidt unearthed an 11,600-year-old religious structure in Turkey. What we do know is that the transition to an agricultural society (the Agricultural Revolution) coincided with the rise of religion. Although various species of humans have existed and evolved for a whopping 2.5 million years, for most of that time they were hunter-gatherers. This suggests that there is a relationship between the Agricultural Revolution, which occurred roughly 10,000 years ago, and the rise of religion around the same time. The obvious commonality between the two is that they both involve large numbers of people coming together to form a community. Unlike hunter-gatherer life, where dozens or even hundreds of people roamed in groups, farming requires a much larger number of people to settle in an area and work together. This is no easy task. 2.5 million years of hunter-gathering proves it. Living in groups of more than a few thousand people requires social order and hierarchy. These moral codes and hierarchies are all figments of the imagination, never granted by a transcendent absolute, which is why these fictional orders are so fragile. But it is religion that gives this precarious order a transcendent legitimacy. By inviting people to believe in a transcendent, absolute God (polytheism also envisions a single God at the apex of a multitude of gods), they set binding norms and values for themselves and create a hierarchy among people. This is one of the proofs that religion has unified humanity.
Of course, religion has contributed to human integration in this way, but would humanity have failed to integrate without religion? In other words, can we say that religion is an essential element of human integration? To answer this question, we need to look back at how human integration has been achieved. We might think that the most stable form of human integration, or “coming together,” is in the form of nations or empires. Why? If everyone is equal, without an absolute power like a king or emperor and a few wise men in power, we can predict that the society will be chaotic. (Even modern societies, which are much more developed than in the past, delegate power to a very small number of people in the aggregate.) So what gives this “power” its legitimacy? In almost all groups, this role has always been played by religion. Any power that is labeled as “absolute, predetermined,” cannot exist in the first place. In order to label it as such, you have to imagine a transcendent being that has existed since the beginning of time and explain that it was granted to you. This begs the question, why did people believe in such an absurd story? At the beginning of human history, it may have been out of awe of natural phenomena. But how did this evolve into organized religion, and why do people still believe in it now that the truth about natural phenomena is known? The jury is still out on this one. There are several explanations, one of which I think is quite convincing: ‘Like a virus, the idea of religion was passed down from parent to child. In fact, if you look at the people around you, you’ll see that most of them were raised in churches, temples, and cathedrals from a young age with their families. And one of the reasons why people still believe in religion in modern times is that humans do not believe only in things that are clearly proven by rationality. According to researcher Mashu Hutson, humans have a magical and religious mind, and without these elements, emphasizing rationality alone cannot maintain a healthy mental state.
In the second paragraph, you mention the source of the power of religion as belief in an absolute deity, but according to Yuval Harari’s definition of religion, it doesn’t have to be a belief in a deity, it can be a belief in any “power”. This is true not only for his definition, but also for the definition of religion in general. This shows that Richard Dawkins’ claim that religion’s obsession with the afterlife leads to murderous acts of terrorism, war, and so on, overlooks the core values of religion. Religion is not about the afterlife. For example, the Old Testament makes no mention of an afterlife at all. Of course, Islamic militants, a problematic group in modern times, do focus on the afterlife, but these examples are few and far between, and it would be a mistake to extrapolate this to characterize all religions. Of course, Dawkins was not criticizing past religions that contributed to human unity as a virus, but rather the increasingly counterproductive role of modern and contemporary religions. So, does religion still serve to unite humanity today? Yes, it does. Religion is woven into our lives in so many different ways.
From the definition of religion, we can consider the question of its scope. Could something other than Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and so on, which we commonly believe to be religions, fall under the scope of ‘religion’? For example, ideologies like capitalism and communism. Let’s take the example of the United States, which is capitalist and liberal. First of all, 70% of the population of the United States is Christian, and only 5% have no religion. In the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, it says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. Thomas Jefferson, who based the Declaration of Independence on the Bible, eliminated all religious elements of the Bible, but retained the ethical precepts and parables of Jesus. From the moment religion originated, it took only the accumulated wisdom of humanity. When you think about it, ideology and religion share a lot of characteristics, and in some cases, modern ideologies derive their legitimacy from religious beliefs, as the United States has shown. What else has religion influenced besides ideology? Religions have long emphasized the welfare of the weak, invoking morality, love, and conscience. But the state never did. The ancient Romans, for example, were very negative about poverty relief, practicing only limited welfare for political purposes. In the 20th century, communism and social democracy have taken religious philanthropy to the extreme, and welfare is a very important issue in modern capitalist and democratic societies. As another example, we live in a strictly capitalist system where we worship the god of money. Many people firmly believe that if you have money, you can get anything. Without this belief, money is just a piece of paper, a shiny piece of stone. But because everyone believes in the power of money, the possibilities are endless. In other words, even if you’re an atheist and skeptical of religion, almost every human being has a religion in which money is a god.
To summarize, thinking of religion as “believing in a god” doesn’t really reflect the nature of religion. Religion is a “belief in an unseen force,” which provides the basis for a large number of humans to come together and cooperate. Without religion, human progress would have been very slow, and the modern world would have looked much the same as it did 2.5 million years ago. And today, as well as in the long past, religion is the glue that holds humanity together, permeating our world in a different form than in the past. This is not to say that religion is a perfect and peaceful invention. Religion inevitably creates conflict. The question of how to minimize this conflict is one we should try to solve. It is one of the most difficult tasks facing humanity, not only in our own time, but also in the future, perhaps even until the end of time.