Why is Every Society Religious?

I remember when I was a kid and leafing through the non-fiction books that they had for kids on cultures of the world these are books with big pictures which show on a peripheral basis how different cultures around the world work as a kid I was entranced with how big and crazy the world was growing up in rural Pennsylvania and an almost allwhite area I Lov looking at all the insane ways people around the world lived I remember seeing all those native peoples living lives which seemed so alien to what I knew I would go through

the segments they had on religion which they covered in cursory terms it would always be stuff like look at these quaint holidays the Hindus celebrate with the underlying theme that I could tell even as a child being these third worlders are too uneducated to actually understand science they still have religion we know better I think it's important to look at stuff like this since how we educate kids demonstrates what the ruling ideology of a society is since it's what's it's socializing the Next Generation to be the view of religion that's underlied here is that it's

not particularly serious that it's a quaint ethnic leftover which people do to be part of their culture that it's an irrational Superstition which makes people spend vast amounts of money on a cathedral or have all these ritual tabos that have no meaning it doesn't increase the economy that if Muslims oppress women due to God telling them so it's just that they're stupid or self-serving however if you read history you can very clearly see see that for thousands of years and hundreds of millions of or billions of people religion is the most important thing in their

lives and religion has held together and propelled entire civilizations and this makes a person think how and why the greatest flaw of the modern worldview is that we can only see the edges of something while we can't see the why we can't grasp the soul of anything we completely ignore subjective experiences thus with religion which at its core is the study of the Soul modernity is completely incapable of comprehending what that actually means we can see the outward forms or the holidays clothing or Traditions but we have no comprehension or respect for the Deep profound

spiritual forces which underly it I grew up in a vaguely Christian background my family attended church and both of my parents were Christian and believed in God but weren't evangelicals however as I've gone through a journey of self-discovery I've realized that the conception of Rel religion I grew up with as a child is completely wrong in a lot of ways religion is the most important thing in the world and we have no conception of how important it is I'm getting ahead of myself here this isn't a video to say whether or not God exists rather

this is a video to explain why religion exists and why it predominates in every single Society although I am religious this is a video that you can very comfortably watch as an atheist or agnostic or at least I hope you can and that's my intention I'm not here to force you to be Christian or religious but to explain why these things exist on a group anthropological basis what is the social purpose of religion and why was it so important to so many of our ancestors when you look back over history you see that nearly every

age of History worshiped the Divine as you'll see those who didn't didn't turn out well we can't understand why this is the case in our day and age however once you do you'll feel the weight of the past and the enormity of the universe weigh on you if you do realize what I'm about to talk about here you'll see a profound Beauty that's incomparable to anything else in [Music] life it is become clear with recent news of the current group think is deeply affecting AI for the worse in contrast the boltzman network emerges as a

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future of crypto and AI where privacy meets unlimited potential boltzman Network pioneering a secure scalable transparent tomorrow for AI with crypto part one four examples it's more important to look at the world and then from the empirical outside evidence you can draw philosophic conclusions the scientific method is at isolation removing variables to determine what the causal principle is in that spirit let me give four examples of societies from around the world and history which removed religion to see what the omission of religion looks like the year is 19 100 Europe dominates the world almost the

entire planet is either a European Colony or one step removed from a European Colony Europe leads the planet in technology culture economy medicine agriculture political military ability and anything else you can think of Europe is half of the entire world's economy European societies have erupted onto a level of development through the Industrial Revolution completely unparalleled in anything else in the world or history Europe can conquer the entire continent of Africa three times its size overnight while taking less than 5,000 casualties Europe is still a strongly Christian Society demographically almost all Europeans are Christian and Europe

is run by monarchies claiming to pull power from divine right however under the surface this faith is waning n in the 1880s proclaimed the death of God or that faith in God was philosophically already dead even though it would take a century to work through he was considered a genius for reaching this conclusion which was controversial n correctly predicted that Europe would go through a horrifying bloody period followed by an age of nihilism the 20th century was fundamentally the century of Europe's decline the European World consumed itself through horrifying Wars Europe lost any optimism as

a society much of Europe fell to horrible evil tyrannies whether fascist woke or communist Europe lost its technological military cultural economic demographic and social advantages to the United States a more religious country who de facto colonized the continent the Europeans lost all of their colonies in 1960 Europe was over 40% of the world's economy and now it's beneath 20% now Europe is going through a process which they openly called degrowth in which their governments are attempting forcible de-industrialization without their God the Europeans got so depressed that they tried to commit civilizational Su whether through Mass

immigration or degrowth the exact same pattern was seen in the Soviet Union in a different way Russia started the century as a demographic economic military political and artistic Powerhouse through self-inflicted wounds from communism Russia ended the century as a shell of a country now most countries in Europe are less than one-third Christian once God died so did Europe the United States one of the most religious countries in the developed World filled the void although the US is still on the same track of religious decline today for the second example the Greeks and Romans were absolutely

stunning and brave I don't think I need to repeat their incredible accomplishments since there are so many and we all know of them however as I say in this video as classical civilization got wealthier it also became less religious starting in Athens as skepticism started to become popular in their Golden Age Athens collapsed as a society within a century Peninsular Greece collapsed into horrifying wars fought brutally and then was conquered by the macedonians as the Macedonian lost their religion a century later the Romans again a more religious people in turn conquered them the Romans were

known as incredibly stoic and moral people and also very religious one of the most so of Any Nation in the known world after they conquered agnostic Greece they imported its philosophy back into Rome this brought all of the social issues that Greece saw into Italy which continued the process as Rome became wealthier its religion and culture collapsed as this occurred Roman society degenerated into disgusting savagery Rome fell in Civil War inequality went through the roof the Republic collapsed the birth R did too and moral degeneracy became ubiquitous after a century of civil wars and degeneracy

the Romans had a conservative religious Reformation under Emperor Augustus who could pull the state back together the damage had already been done and the Romans had lost their freedom in Republic it wasn't enough and then Rome suffered under evil and pervers supposed God Emperors like tiberious ciglar and Nero the irreligious Romans weren't able to maintain their birth rate or fight their enemies so over the centuries their empire fell as a cursory comparison the comparable Confucian religious Chinese Empire at the same time survived the Chinese were able to enforce moral standards upon their population in a

way that the Romans weren't to jump to an example which I think might surprise some people the Muslim world of the 10th century was actually a pretty agnostic Society the Abid copit was very tolerant to other religions and the ruling ideology were the mutala freethinkers who believe that you should interpret the Quran in a symbolic way and the truth could be found through studying the world rationally and scientifically homosexuality and female empowerment were popular in this era as was multiculturalism however the society collapsed into degeneracy the Abid copit collapsed as Civil War Barbarian invasions or

slave revolts rocked across and destroyed the Empire the urban population of the Empire collapsed stly as the Middle East became depopulated there were many cities of over a million people in Iran which just got completely wiped out birth rates crashed as religious Fanatics and Turkish barbarians repopulated the Middle East Islam is so religious today as a reaction to the degeneracy and agnosticism of a thousand years ago for the fourth and final example let's go back thousands of years if you want to see the Old Testament from a game theory perspective is that the Jews started

in one of the worst spawn points on the map they were surrounded by giant Empires which they couldn't defeat and were stuck at the crossroads of the map with no Geographic boundaries to protect them while they were a tiny minority in an area the size of New Jersey the Old Testament was written over the course of 2,000 years and is basically a playthrough model for what worked for the Jews as a society a reason the Bible is so use ful is the Jews went through every single phase Society can go through foreign Conquest being genocided

being enslaved Barbarian Conquest being an Empire decadence class exploitation wealth poverty or Civil War the Jews compiled what strategies did and didn't worked they found in every single one of these situations loyalty to God was the effective strategy the Old Testament isn't perfect history and that it is part mythology but we have enough records from other Societies in that time period is that the broad historical Trends are accurate one of the things which is weird to read about in the Old Testament is that past a certain point you'll just think why can't they just follow

God you read about them being punished again and again and again for not following God you get annoyed when they don't listen to Moses for the fifth time even though he liberated them from slavery the thing to keep in mind though is that the Old Testament takes place over the course of 2,000 years so what is one page in the Bible is really 400 years humans always think their era is special so in the 12th century BC under Moses or 600 BC under the prophets the Jews thought this time was different and their empire would

be fine they didn't need God anymore that they had progressed to a higher level what the Old Testament was trying to show is that this narrative had been played through so many times and was never correct in summary the Old Testament was a record of how the Jews strayed from God a dozen times and it ever worked with these four examples we've looked at societies around the world from each major area of History whether the Bronze Age Iron Age Middle Ages or modernity from this I hope you can see that there's an incredible amount of

continuity here the thing is I could pull on dozens of examples here I could talk about modern America China before Confucius India before Buddha Italy and the Renaissance and so so many more the thing is this pattern is repeated ad nauseum in history now why does this happen before before we continue a brief Shameless plug where you all should support my podcast history 102 on my different Channel where I do episodes with Eric torenberg where every episode we discuss a new era of history and we've just done with season 1 where I explain the Vikings

the fall of Rome colonial America modern China World War I and other topics and we're going to have season 2 soon in our goal is to go through all of history so if you want to learn history in a fun conversational way check out history 102 at the link below part two explaining the logic the historical pattern goes something like this a society is religious and from that it has strong values these strong values help the society on every single level people have more children they're more willing to die in war they trust each other

more the upper classes oppress the lower classes less their intellectual studies are more honest thus the society thrives on an evolutionary basis a large part of religion is the creation of traits which we know are pro-social these include treating other people well bravery family values or delayed gratification the particulars of the religion depend on that society and its circumstances or level of development the religions of the ancient world for example prioritize sacrifices either human or animal while those of the big religions today prioritize person personal daily sacrifices on a moral basis often these are correlations

in that a society which say practices Human Sacrifice is demonstrating symbolically to the Natural order and themselves that they're willing to do what they have to to succeed when I see people hate on religion and I think there are criticisms you can make of religion this is really the reason they don't want to be held to moral standards people say religion is bloodthirsty and intolerant this is true but it's also true of any belief structure since we live in a world of scarcity and brutal Darwinism a philosophy that's too nice because it'll just get everyone

killed and that's not good or moral atheism has killed far more people than religion communism has killed more people than every other ideology and religion in history combined people often hate on Christianity for these reasons but let's do some comparisons the Crusades killed 2 million people the witch burning is around 50,000 the Spanish Inquisition was like 30,000 the Spanish conquest of the new world was 15 million and the 30 Years War was 7 million now communism killed 80 million people and fascism 40 million over a much much shorter time frame the Atlantic slave trade was

justified by humanists who said that if the Greeks and Romans did slavery it was fine while the church opposed it if you want to look at pre-industrial bloody wars they're mostly concentrated in the areas in which the religions were weaker whether China or the nomads of the Eurasian step likewise people will talk about religion being intolerant the thing they won't say is the Catholic Church invented the scientific method maintained literacy in the Dark Ages and was the biggest funer of science including Galileo's research Galileo fell a fowl of internal politics in the church not for

anything he actually said meanwhile agnostic ideologies have done much worse look at the Nazis or Communists who massively were messing with science for their own personal gain even look at our society where we're searching a race sex trans or other taboo topics can literally get you cancelled or even thrown in jail in a lot of the West I can't see how you can hate on the Catholic Church while we're doing the exact same thing the real reason we hate religion as a culture is we don't want to be held to any standards that we have

to be moral humble temperate Brave kind chaste and all those other things if we look at this intuitively of course we don't like it because those things are hard and unpleasant as a society we don't look at the world in moral terms since we don't want to since we don't want to come up short as a kid I wondered why our society wasn't more moralizing where I thought in society why don't we criticize people for not being kind or not being brave or Earnest and this is the reason I once told a friend that we

don't believe there are lessons in history since we don't want to be held to any standards and have to change furthermore those in in power don't want to think there are any barriers to them achieving total power religions create moral checks upon the powerful you can very closely correlate the tax rate with religiosity all agnostic societies have big government and large tax rates and almost all religious societies have lower tax rates with smaller governments if you look at the top five mass murderers in history only one of them belongs to a axial Age religion with

two being Mongols with Tamar Lane the only religious one he was barely civilized then you had two Communists Mau and Stalin and Hitler who publicly pretended to be Christian but in his actual documents and plans loathed Christianity all the worst tyrannies in history whether the nais Communists or the tyrannies of the Chin Dynasty China and Caligula were all ignostic you have to try very hard to find a religious regime that's anywhere near as bad there are two different kinds of ways societies can deal with agnosticism one of which is to become tyrannical where to fill

the void that's left by not having God politics takes the void but then to deliver they have to have utopian fantasies to motivate the population and thus you get horrifying tyrannies like the Communist Nazis or the Chin Dynasty and the second group is degeneracy in which through removing the moral standards associated with religion you just have perversion and oppressing your own lower classes and insane partying and the society collapses into degeneracy a point I want to throw in here is that religion is not perfect and you will find negative things religions have done and one

of the worst things religions do is they become too conservative and unable to change and I think we could agree that a country like Afghanistan is a very clear example of that sort of thing also I'm focusing here upon how successful societies need religion but religion is not the sole precondition not all religious societies are successful or if you could look at Africa or a lot of places in the Middle East today where religion is a precondition for a long-term successful Society but you need other things such as property rights a normal political system a

motivated population a good geography Etc religions also do good through wiring people's brains in certain ways we don't think about this but we know psychologically that people of limiting mindsets and good mindsets a great example of this is that people who think they have agency in their lives statistically do vastly better than those who think their lives are determined by luck this is true even when you remove other confounding variables your mindset determines a tremendous amount of your life if you view adversity as an opportunity for self-improvement you'll do better than a person who sees

it as purely negative those who are kind and pro-social will cooperate better than those who aren't religions promote mindfulness or calmness and mental security mindfulness is always good where even in the worst situations it's important to stay calm and secure anxiety and hysteria are never useful what religions do is wire the population's brains towards good settings from the cradle they raise the entire Society to good mindsets that operate subconsciously for their entire lives we don't really think of this in our society but almost all of human thinking is subconscious and is Wired from childhood so

the religion exists to do that wiring and if it doesn't do it there will be worse natural alternatives that develop for Christianity as an example the idea that God loves you no matter what is a good and healthy thing to believe since it limits self-loathing which is never positive even if you've done wrong the idea that the Universe loves you will give you the motivation to improve the reason we take this for granted in our society is that we don't have a concept of how dark human nature can get we're so safe we've forgotten why

we put religion in the first place however ever when you don't do this your Society will see tyranny genocide slavery Madness incredible anxiety and mental health issues the human nature without any constraints isn't a noble savage it collapses into horrible nightmares over time in many cases the society reaches a point where they resent the existence of these religious standards in the first case thus resulting in loathing religion itself people like to imagine the decline in religion as rational well really that's IR rationalis Iz ation successful in modernizing societies are religious those in Decline are agnostic

when we look at the greatest scientific and social advances of the West which occurred in the 15th through 20th centuries it was when the West Was A strongly Christian Society this all reminds me of two ideas by historians I very much respect the first is Will Durant who is potentially one of the greatest historians of all time who would say that all societies start with stoicism and end with Epic iism in that they start with very rigid often irrational and aggressive moral codes but then as the society goes on for longer and it becomes wealthier

those gradually collapse into degeneration and love of sensory pleasure until the society having gone through a cultural flowering collapses after this a new stronger Society emerges and the cycle restarts this also reminds me of of Spangler who developed his civilizational cycles of history and Spangler is a very Advanced philosopher and he's one of the worst authors I have ever read writing wise so here's a text well to summarize his work but the short answer is that a certain geographic region in culture develops cultural Technologies and a sense of symbol and soul for the world that

Society keeps growing but as the world changes it loses touch with what that so soul is and as the society urbanizes and becomes more mechanical it becomes more soulless so much so that that soul is worn through and a new civilization must emerge with a newer Soul the thing is that religion versus irreligion is not a rational Choice it's a statement of faith based off whether you believe the world to be mechanistic or alive if you believe the universe to be alive and have a soul even if you do believe in science or the why

you will be religious science and religion aren't in cont contradiction due to self-interests for both factions they've been presented as that over Western history knowing the how doesn't stop you from wondering about the why even if you don't have science you can have agnosticism if you view the world as a mechanical soulless place which was true in the ancient world the reason I say this as I said before is that there were large periods of agnosticism in the past the Greeks and Romans as said earlier are a good example as were the Muslims of a

thousand years ago there were large periods of the Bronze Age in which there was AOS ISM the period around 500 BC across EUR Asia before the axial age was a period of nihilism and agnosticism religions grow weaker not due to logic or science but as Society grows wealthier secondly religions go into decline when the society changes so much that the old religions aren't useful or connectable to a new world the axial age or the foundation of most of the world's religions around 500 BC happened since people in a globalized world couldn't believe in the god

of the local stream anymore in our current age the old religions are no longer compelling with the Industrial Revolution religion and irreligion go through historic Cycles in a civilization's Evolution as I explained through this text wall this goes back thousands of years you can look at the Babylonians or the Egyptians to see who they went through phases of irreligion the reason we are the least religious era in history is since we are the wealthiest and the one which has had the most rapid social and technological change neurologically there is a right and left hemisphere the

right hemisphere consistently gets the right answer when tested it's capable of seeing the so truth meaning context and things flowing over time the left hemisphere can only see logical structures money power and things that can be mechanically measured it gets the answer wrong when tested but believes what it says with total certainty while the right is correct but humble the right hemosphere can literally draw an entire painting while the left can only draw half every single Society with an urban Elite is agnostic in every single Society with a rural Elite is religious the reason for

this is that if you deal with the natural world in a daily basis you will intuitively believe that the world is conscious and Alive since that's a reflection of the natural order if you're cutting through the jungle what you think doesn't matter it's what the jungle throws at you meanwhile once you get to large Urban societies everything you deal with is an abstract mechanical human thing in this case mechanical processes determine your life thus in a rural Society the idea that there is a mother nature or that the world is inherently alive and personal is

obvious while in an urban Society it's intuitively mechanical since that's what you see on a daily basis as the society gets wealthier more urban and advanced than its original condition it starts to discard its religion as not being necessary to short-term survival what happens at this point is that through the removal of the constraints with religion you get short-term gains the Bible says that if you go the way of Satan you will get pleasure and short-term gain while destruction in the longterm the sexual Revolution is an easy example of this with the Summer of Love

in the short term but various social standards around sex eroded with it crashing the total amount of sex since there stopped being guiding principles to cooperate between the Sexes another example of this is how you can print money in the short term for some economic gain but doing so as a long-term principle will destroy your economy and Society the Vindication of the weakening of religion is Justified for a generation due to these short-term gains this makes people then feel that they need religion even less than before thus making this a compounding process until Society eventually

collapses what often happens after this is a period of bloody wars and tyranny examples of this are Europe in the 20th century the pelian wars the fall of the abids or 20th century East Asia then after this the society just collapsed into decadence followed by social erosion and collapse in birth rate followed by nihilism people often say it's different this time since we have science we will replace god with science that being said let's look at Europe which has lost its ability to innovate technologically economically or culturally which it shed to America a society which

remained religious longer rationality can't exist without faith without a sense of moral grounding it devolves into rationalizing for personal gain intellectuals stop carrying helping people but rather trying to rent seek as a society falls apart so does its intellectual ability people will also bring up examples like the Nordic countries or Japan which are secular wealthy prosperous safe societies one of the great flaws of our age though is that we can't see things over time these societies are well off now due to centuries of strong religions but are in a process of decline these are some

of the most rapidly aging societies while their Global importance is crashing Japan in the Nordic countries percentage of the global economy and inventions have collapsed precipitously against America or the developing world let's check back on these countries in 30 years and they will lose what they have now for a frame of reference this Theory here that I have is supported by Plato iban calun the Old Testament pus confucious will Durant the founding fathers and many many more thinkers it was the normal belief across almost all of human history effectively all of the smartest people in

history agreed on this doesn't that mean it's probably true you could say that they're biased since they're religious but that's not true a lot of these thinkers were agnostic but saw the social importance of religion furthermore why is being religious a bias but being non-religious isn't number three the well these are the Blue rdge Mountains in the western part of the state of Virginia they're objectively beautiful you could show this photo to people in China or the Congo in they degree from that we know that beauty is a real thing people like to say that

beauty is a social construct and that's partly true but it's also not this also shows that beauty exists naturally independent of humanity we can see this in the Universal admiration for the artistic trends of completely separate societies I collect Chinese art for example but I'm white our society doesn't want to believe beauty is objective since we don't want to be held to any standards that being said once societies do make beautiful things look at the cistin chapel this Zen Buddhist Garden the Venus Deo or ha Sophia what do they have in common they're religious human

creativity comes from The Well of the Divine Science was established by monks in the Middle Ages Plato and Socrates both spoke to Spirits who gave them their ideas the ancient Greeks said that there were spiritual Muses which bestow Beauty and Brilliance upon their chosen Mortals if you look at intellectual breakthroughs in most cases they come from the spiritual I think of a breakthrough for DNA where the discoverer saw a spiral shape of DNA in a fantasy and then researched it seeing it actually did have the same spiral shape as our society has removed itself from

mysticism and religion we've become less creative and Brilliant this is most obvious in the Arts but technological progress by every single metric has declined over the last 150 years look at our reboots caty repetitive pop songs and boring histories we're a society which it's turned its back on the Divine and now our society reflects that ugliness and boredom all beauty comes either from nature or God try to prove me wrong everything beautiful in this world stems from being a mirror to the soul of the world there is an underlying soul to the universe a beauty

a profundity and Truth which a us with how spectacular it is we've all had moments of wonder in which the incredible nature of the world just shocks Us in those moments life with all its pain suffering and torture is finally worth living this is a neurological State we've found scientifically in which from studies people are capable of feeling inner peace these states act as resets to how brutal reality is there are certain people whom we call Holy who can permanently exist in this state of profundity and peace the purpose of religion is to instill this

state over reality and our daily lives as much as possible I've nearly died four times I'm actually grateful as each time it forced me to take my life more seriously death is a beautiful thing and once you pull back you see the flowers are more beautiful the sky Bluer and life more meaningful I made a vow to live my life to the fullest in every possible way once you have experienced like that in which you can intuitively grasp the fullness of life it makes you change how you live the problem is our society doesn't do

that at all everything we do is so nihilistic and meaningless everything is a Pastiche on everything else nothing means anything we're just constantly circlejerking ourselves trying to forget why we're alive we hate those who even ask that question we try to consume ourselves in Hedonism so we don't have to stop and think we've lost touch with what life is really about I once read a book by an orthodox Theologian who said that in life today we desperately try to numb ourselves to the meaninglessness of life and those who realize it go crazy is it any

coincidence our societies are committing Collective suicide from nihilism now once you look at history through this lens you'll see that it's a dance in which different factions play their role for God one group May launch a crusade another invent something make something beautiful or just farm and raise a family they all know their place within the soul of the world and that gives them the courage and will to continue once they forget why they're doing this they lose the will to continue their society fails and then someone else takes up the Baton the universe either

has order and meaning built into it or it doesn't and it's a meaningless machine you can choose to view it either way the point I will make however is it's clearly not a meaningless Place given we need meaning to survive and function as a species if the universe was inherently meaningless then men wouldn't be willing to die for meaning the thing is that if the machine's only role was to continue in of itself that would be meaningful enough nihilism is a cancer which has no logical reason to exist living life is Meaningful itself you can't

just off since you have duties in life those to your nation the natural order your children or family nihilism is the abdication of responsibility for no gain as those who are nihilists are depressed and self-loathing in all reality for those of you who saw my video on the CIA and the spirit world that I just released new scientific discoveries are asking the questions does the spirit world actually exist and does Consciousness create reality and although these are still contested what happens if they're true that would mean the rest of history is right and we're wrong

at the same time we've been wrong before so nothing new