One can seek decidabiity in the laws of the universe or one can anthropomorphize those laws into divinities. The convenience of a divinity is that it is most comprehensible to humans by requiring the least knowledge – and it can diverge from the laws of the universe to suit the interests of the prophets at the expense of others.
East asia was and in many ways remains comparatively atheist – and they consistently ridicule us for our ‘silly superstitions’.
To say religion is necessary for indoctrination into a system of weights and measure such that there is relative uniformity sufficient to suppress potential conflict (ethical and moral diversity) is true just as money and accounting are necessary for the formation of large scale markets, and mathematics is necessary for engineering scale architecture.
Man evolved cooperation, division of labor, reciprocity and altruistic punishment in the absencse of any superstition, while preserving selfishness, cheating, parasitism, and predation. The benefit of doing so is the adaptive range of man to either cooperate or survive stresses is preserved in the genome.
We do not need religion for morality because morality is always and everywhere merely sovereignty and reciprocity – non aggression. However, the conditions necessary to survive scarcity vs the degree of sovereignty and reciprocity necessary to survive by cooperation to defeat that scarcity, cause us to incrementally increase the precision of morality becuase morality is simply advantagous in cooperative velocity and therefore productivity and therefore competitive survial against both nature and man.
We need RITUAL INDOCTRINATION (of which recitation of myths during feast festival oath and burial are the cheapest form) to produce the protocol of reciprocal cooperation in the context of our environment using our group evolutionary strategy. This indoctrination provides mindfulness (the suppression of neuroticism) as our relative insurance by the group we depend upon for survival produces alienation given our relative irrelevance as the scale of cooperation and trade increases.
Sorry for the theists, but as Augustine Aquinas Smith Hume Blackstone Darwin Menger and the rest of the economists explained, ‘natural law’ is observable, and that law is just sovereignty and reciprocity limiting us to voluntary cooperation in all possible contexts – contexts we call markets, and markets for association, cooperation, production, reproduction, commons, polities, and war.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation
Reply addressees: @Uncommonsince76 @SethDillon