Before we can “remove the need that created it” we have to know what that need is, and I’m not sure we know precisely what that is yet. Dr. Wolff is an economist, so naturally he sees things in terms of economic forces. And he’s a Marxian economist, so he tends to focus on the ills of capitalism.

I suspect religion is more deeply woven into our biological/cultural essence than at a solely economic level. It may be an artificial safety net, in that it may be more cultural than biological, but I wouldn’t call it false, because it may well play a major role in enabling us to function beyond hunter-gatherer levels of societal sophistication.

Affluent societies that appear less religious on the surface have changed the labeling on some of their behaviors to make them appear fashionably secular, but still rely on religion-sourced practices such as meditation and yoga in order to cope with the unnatural stresses of living and cooperating with large groups of strangers.

We have survived by artificial means now for over ten thousand years, and in that time we have become a soft, domesticated species. I doubt we could survive the loss of our artificiality now.

@skado I disagree that we couldn't survive as a species without an artificial religion guiding us. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment.

Whether one calls the feeling of a safety net that religion provides false, artificial or mythical, I consider it to be more of a placebo, rather than real support society could be providing. I don't think our society is better off with supernatural religious ideas.

The spiritual needs of our society are no longer being fed as robustly by faith in the supernatural as in previous times. Many of the beliefs are challenged by our growing intellectual knowledge in our modern society.

Going backward can never be the answer, but we can try (and possibly fail with) real methods of addressing the concerns of society, instead of reliance on faith in a supernatural deity.

Seems to me, governments use the supernatural (artificial, false or mythical) deity as a puppet for the ruling powers, fueled by greed, to enrich the rich and keep the poor down. I'm not an economist, but my impression is that religion favors capitalism. I see nothing wrong with the poor folks figuring this out and rising up. I feel that would be a good thing. Again, I don't claim to know anything about economics, but was primarily speaking to emotional spirituality and strength.

I’m optimistic that by addressing the social needs in a real manner, economically or otherwise, the reliance on mythical spiritual strength will be lessened, and people can switch from faith in the supernatural to faith in community and their fellow humans, and themselves. Just my feeling. That’s not to say meditation, community social support and other practices of religion can’t be a part of a more humanistic spiritual life.

@Julie808
I don’t think you’re misunderstanding my comment, but I do think we make different assumptions about exactly what constitutes “religion.” And that’s my fault, not yours. I hold an opinion about the nature of religion that is at odds with the popular view that religion is defined by a belief in the supernatural. Otherwise I agree with most of what you’re saying.

I tend to relate belief in the supernatural more with absence of education than with presence of religious practice. E. O. Wilson said something along the lines of ‘We are a conflicted species, and our survival depends on it.’ I may have quoted imprecisely, but that’s the gist of it. My guess is, we are conflicted in more ways than one, but our invention of agriculture some ten to twelve thousand years ago was a giant step away from our ancestral environment, and toward a truly artificial way of living.

You can’t fool Mother Nature, but you can devise workarounds. Our biology is that of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer, but we’re living in conditions that are wholly unnatural to that biological inheritance. Homo sapiens makes up the difference by adjusting culture.

I think religion is better defined as a cultural counterbalance to the evolutionary mismatch caused by the civilizing of a nomadic species. Superstition worked pretty well as a servant of that purpose as long as we were ignorant, but another invention of ours, the internet, is again removing us even further from our natural state. We no longer have the luxury of ignorance but we are still in need, arguably more-so, of a cultural (artificial) counterbalance.

The place that religion holds in this picture, before the loss of ignorance as well as after, is that of a practice, rather than a belief. We must practice the skills of not murdering each other like a multitude of heathens crammed into a confining space (which is very much our ‘natural’ disposition under those circumstances) or we will do exactly that.

We have a choice. We could go feral (but we would never choose that voluntarily) or we can maintain a cultural practice that trains our hunter-gatherer instincts away from xenophobia and toward an unnatural embrace of strangers.

Not only can this be done without a belief in things that aren’t real, but I am confident that an awareness of objective truth is actually an ally in this project. What we are biologically unequipped to do is live in close proximity to an overwhelming majority of strangers, without a cultural corrective. And I suspect most of us modern humans would perish if we tried going feral.

We may be able to survive without belief but very unlikely to without practice. For as long as organized religions have existed (interestingly about as long as agriculture has existed) only a privileged few had access to the esoteric knowledge that the heart of religion was practice, not belief. I think it’s time for that secret to go public.

@skado Maybe practice in being good humans is a start. And erasing the feeling that others are strangers. The world is getting smaller and smaller with our technology. In time, a change in "practice" and more positive actions will come, hopefully.

Creative Endeavor?....Art, business, sport, skilled trade, hobby,

Here's a skill that almost everyone I encounter can work in: listening and communicating.

I don't think there is any shortage of ways that we can improve and limit Ye Olde Spiritual Hole

@twill It has worked for me. I chose art, literature, culture, that type of thing and I like secular humanism in theory. The trouble, at least in my country, is that these things have little traction so the hole remains unfilled.