From “The Basis of Morality” by Tim Madigan in Philosophy Now magazine.
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The idea being that arguing back and forth about whether religion is a good thing or a bad thing, misses the point.
This one: That for all practical purposes it was necessary to invent it. Why? Because as we evolved from those naked apes living in caves to the communities that we are familiar with going back centuries now, without it there was really no capacity to anchor human interactions to anything that might be embraced teleologically.
Indeed, why on earth would one choose to be good if not in order to be in sync with the rules of behaviors that are said [in any particular community] to be in sync with the “meaning of life” itself?
And how else to secure a belief that death is not the end of life at all?
There’s only one possible font for that. And while philosophers eventually came along to explore all of this more “academically”, science was progressing to the point that “the meaning of things” we experienced from day to day became more and more in sync with the discovery of “natural laws” than with supernatural explanations.
But God and religion are still the only way to connect the dots between “here and now” and “there and then”.
Or, rather, they are if teleology is important to you.