Wwould the world be better off without religion?

Interesting how many people assume "without religion" means "without spirituality" or "without god".

There are many people who believe that one can have a relationship with god or be spiritual without being religious. In fact, a number of nondenominational Christian churches believe that religion is damaging and interferes with having a saving relationship with God.

No one is in any position to say one way or the other.

Religion may have had just as much positive effect as negative effect, only those with a bias for or against it claim to know one way or the other.

Positives - united idoelogies and codes of ethics, thus brought millions of small minded warring groups of people together long enough to allow them to advance their culture.

Negatives - other religions/areas did the same thing, giving the now larger groups, just another reason to be divisive, thus causing large scale wars

In other words, religions are like sponges, yes they soak up/bring people in the immediate area together, but are still at loggerheads with those from other sponges.

I see religion as the stabilizers on civilisations/humanities bike - very useful in the early days, but will soon become obsolete and is already becoming more of a hinderance than a help.

Thats just generally though.

On an individual basis, religion will always exist.

as long as their are desperate, fearful, hopeless, thus irrational people, you will always find a hope bringing myth among them.

no one can thoroughly get rid of faith from the international. human beings will nonetheless have faith in a god, purely like Nasa nonetheless believes in a team of craters on the different edge of the moon.faith would have led to deaths, yet so has water. might the international be greater valuable off without water? What are examples of those atheist countries, and do those countries nonetheless have philosophies that have faith in karma, including Taoism and Confucius and Buddhism? in case you pay interest to what a faith including Christianity teaches, you may think of that the Christian countries could be maximum non violent, yet their delight of their faith motives it to not be so. Why not purely end threatening religions? there is not any backing to help your claims.

I think it would. At the same time it's really only the nutters who create the wars over religion. If it was peaceful (or remained so without the zealots) then it would be fine. But because of those morons who fight in the name of their Lord, I'd say the world would be better off...

I quite sincerely believe the world would be better off without religion, leaving us to simply believe or not believe in God. I doubt that God would be upset! I can tell you who would be upset though, those who have turned God into a religion, there is a lot of money and even more power in controlling how we serve God!

The world would be better off without some people's interpretations of religion, but in general religion makes the world a better place.

No but it would be a lot better off if everyone would just keep their religious beliefs to themselves and not try to push them onto others.

Religious belief is a deeply personal thing,please keep it that way.

No. Everyone needs something to believe in, to give them faith. Things in religion like Christians forcing their faith on people or Muslims killing all infidels need to be omitted. And the religious zealots like Hitler or Osama Bin Laden. Those are the reasons why we have wars, not because of faith.

The world would be farrrrrr offfff than better without religion. Think about it. If religion introduced morals of what is right and what is wrong, to judge our actions, what would it be without it. Plus people went to war not because it was religiouse but because they used it as an excuse.

Ofcourse Hitler dislike the Jews because he was racist.

Would the world be better off without fire?

No global warming. No arson.

But wait, no warmth, no cooked food, no light.

Hmmm. Wait. Maybe it's not the tool, but the people who use the tool that are the problem.