Could religions have been invented to preserve world order?

1730580561

No. If we look at Christianity, the early saints were boiled alive, dismembered, crucified, crucified upside down, beheaded, their loved ones were fed to lions, so on so forth. The romans gave them a proposition: that they could avoid these fates by simply renouncing Christ and the things they saw him do. Not a single one renounced Christ and all chose to suffer horrible fates instead.

Do you think they could do this for a lie agreed upon? At least to me, it makes no logical sense. They believed in Christ, wholeheartedly, not to preserve anything like world peace, but because they truly believed in Christ as the living Truth.

(in fact Christ is quite clear that his existence was not to bring peace but to upheave the current world in Matthew 10:34: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.")

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1730338593

Religions originally came about from a desire to explain the natural world! humans are very curious creatures, and want to know how things work. How did that hill get there? Where did we come from? We have actually proven answers to these now due to science but ancient humans came up with stories to explain things the best they could. These are animistic religions, religion based around nature.
Eventually they started to base around a more solid concept of a being or beings that may have taken part in the stories, and people began to focus more on the beings than the nature. More stories and rituals emerged from this. These religions are almost all polytheistic, meaning they have multiple deities involved. This was the main form of religion for most of history until some guy called Abraham invented the first monotheistic religion- Judaism! from there, Christianity and Islam showed up from some of Abraham's descendants (long and complicated story), so the three are known as the Abrahamic religions. All of them started out pretty innocently enough but as soon as they had power, the human urge to use that power started taking over a lot of religion, and that's how we got to where we are today. Some translations of religious texts were explicitly to control their populations, so your theory is somewhat accurate, but it doesn't apply to all religions! there are some that are just chilling, and some that are trying to be evil, but also some branches of those ones are just chilling. it's interesting! I'm an atheist myself but religion in general is super fascinating to me :)

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1729952783

i mean, it makes sense doesn't it? one of the major points of why religion exists is to give a belief to someone to make them feel that there's a being out there for them. to protect them and watch over them, to give them the promise of a life after death or heaven in some cases. all these attained as rewards for the good you do. and a good amount of religions define that good as the good you show others to some extent or another at the very core. so by that logic religion could've definitely been so that it contributes to world peace in a way (although its kind of done the opposite now in some aspects). idk if my world order you mean world peace but thats my take on it

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