Religion Without A God

“With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” – Steven Weinberg, Nobel Winner for Physics

I basically agree with him, but only because I am looking at an expanded definition of religion.

In essence, Weinberg is saying that morals do not require the overtones of religion, but that with religion the becomes of the possibility of good men acting in the name of evil.

The problem with dealing with people is that you learn over time that “religion” doesn’t necessarily involve the supernatural. It can involve any situation that involves a person who has found a cause for which he is willing to give his life, or at least make a major sacrifice for it. This cause does not need to involve the supernatural; it can be anything from saving puppies to saving the world. Throw in patriotic fervor, and odds are pretty good that whole crowds of people will go along with it.

And we all know that whole crowds of people going in the same direction can lead to bad things.

At this point, you effectively have a religion. You have people willing to die for a cause, are willing to do anything that their leadership tells them to without question, and are motivated to succeed. In short, you have some very scary mojo going on. You have a crowd of people that need to succeed at whatever the goal is. And the scariest thing is that you don’t need a god. You just need someone with a charisma at the heart of a bad situation. And there have been plenty of those to go around.

Consider Russia in the 1910s. The nobility was out of control, the peasants were being treated poorly, and there was a hotbed of political unrest. Rather than look at the peasant situation and do something about it they went to war, hoping that the peasants would focus on that rather than the overall situation. By the 1920s, the nobles were dead, fleeing, or shipped off to labor camps, along with everyone that represented a threat or disagreed with the Bolshevik regime. Within a decade so many millions had died that we only have estimates of those killed. This would be done concurrently with the Chinese Revolution. And in the 1930s, it would be repeated yet again in Germany, ravaged more by the Versailles Treaty than any war.

This also applied to ages past, such as the Anarchist Revolt in the 1870s, when a group of people decided to do something about the industries sweeping across America. Going further back is the French Revolution, which although reasonably just was one of the bloodiest revolutions ever. In each case there was a large crowd of people that decided that they had had enough and needed to do something about it, and then a fire took over, a passion that their cause was just and that any means to make it succeed was acceptable.

In short, social justice became a god, and that god demanded blood sacrifice on the scale of the Aztecs. But no god was involved, and yet religious fervor was nonetheless involved. So I don’t think you need a god to have a religion, and that sometimes those religions are scarier than those with ever could be.