I`m sorry, I can`t agree with that in any way.
The fear of God, under my perspective, is one of the biggest problems in humanity right now. To believe that something is controlled by a divine-force, including your life, your desitions, and than everything can be forgive at your last moment...
Let`s talk about how religion is seeking mind-control. When human kind appeared in the face of the earth (more than 150.000 years ago) there where some common beliefs, as something magic related to rain, life itself and so. In the prehistoric art before the first cities in the world it is virtually impossible to find any scene of people fighting other people, but people hunting animals and such. I`m talking about a period in history in which there where few humans, small groups of them, walking in the earth, nomads seeking their haunt and in a total balance with the nature. Then, possibly due to a climate change, the humankind begun to build cities. Soon in the ancient cave-art they begun to paint human vs human fights, grupal rituals and such. It happends arround the 9.000 B.C. (notice how huge period it is).
If you want to look for a time when humans were in equilibrium with the environment you have to go back much farther then 9,000 year ago. You probably have to go back at least 50,000 years. That appears to be when the human species breached our equilibrium with nature. This period has been described as the Great Leap Forward. It was a fundamental technological, social or evolutionary leap that allowed humanity to break the prior constraints which had kept its population small and limited to Africa.
http://blog.23andme.com/news/the-first-population-explosion-human-numbers-expanded-dramatically-millennia-before-agriculture/The authors found genetic evidence for a surge in human population size about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This period, just after humans first set foot outside Africa, is of great interest to archaeologists because it coincides with a dramatic increase in the sophistication of human behavior. People began crafting tools from bone, burying their dead and fashioning clothing to keep themselves warm in cool climates. They developed complex hunting techniques, and created great works of art in the form of cave paintings and jewelery.
The archaeological record also shows that during this time, humans began hunting more dangerous prey and more easily exploiting small game like rabbits and birds. They traveled farther than they had before, perhaps due to the growth of long-distance trade routes the first of their kind. Jared Diamond, author of The Third Chimpanzee, calls this period The Great Leap Forward, when humans burst forth culturally finally separating themselves from their evolutionary cousins.
The exact cause for these changes in human behavior may never be known. Some believe a simple genetic mutation or that the evolution of language could have sparked such a dramatic change. But what we do know now, thanks to this new genetic research, is that like the (much later) invention of agriculture this explosion of innovation was accompanied by population growth.
A primitive mankind was in a natural competitive equilibrium with nature. We breached this equilibrium with knowledge. Sometime around 50,000 years ago our ancient ancestors acquired the knowledge needed to explosively overcome the constraints that had previously kept our numbers and progress in check. We ceased living as a part of nature and began to dominate it. This breakthrough led to the spread of humanity throughout the world.
It may also have started a countdown to our extinction. Having acquired enough knowledge to breach environmental equilibrium we are now compelled to acquire sufficient knowledge to reestablish some kind of new equilibrium at a higher level. The development of agriculture was likely inevitable. Once a species develops culture and that culture can retain new knowledge and transmit it further development is inevitable.
It was the advance in knowledge that opened areas previously closed to humanity. It opened the entire world to our domination. At the very beginning in world empty of humanity with newly opened lands just over the next hill there would have been less violence. As the population inevitability grew to fill these lands, however, mans new mastery of the world would have made fellow men rather then the environment the greatest thread to his survival. Thus organized armies and war. Indeed there are reasons to believe war played a larger role then agriculture in spawning large and complex societies.
DATA GEEKS SAY WAR, NOT AGRICULTURE, SPAWNED COMPLEX SOCIETIES
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/cliodynamics-war/ So, when humans come togheter, there is war, bounderies problems and, the most important of all, unequal distribution. Now we have specialists in so many areas: we have agriculture from the first time, walled cities to protect their reserves, war, and religioust specialist to convince people to work. Yes. To convince them. Since the very beggining, fearing a god means too many things:
1.- There are a few knowing (and somehow having) the world of God in them. So they get to have a privileged status and to dictate the norms, because they are the chosen ones. If you make the people to believe that, then they will live forever under the fear and they will believe whatever you want them to believe.
2.- Governments were chosen, as well. So your succeed in life is not longer related to your abbilities, but the kind of blood you have in your veins.
3.- The first tyrant government appeared based on religion status. Only by the fear of something supernatural you can have all this power. Just read the Old Testament.
4.- The legitimacy of unfair power. By explaining everything that can`t be controlled by human kind under the supernatural explanation, and by giving all the possible communication between those supernatural forces and humanbeings to a few, you can make anything legit.
Why the rain is destroying everything? Because you don`t give enough money to church. Why my son is dying? Because you are a siner. How can we stop this to happen? By maintaining a church, a monument, a faraon, a cesar...
You are saying that religion was and is used as a tool of control and oppression. This is true. It is fact that many ancient societies and their "gods" were used as systems of oppression to justify the rule of the powerful. If you don't understand that you don't understand history. Here is another article that highlights this well.
The darker link between ancient human sacrifice and our modern world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/05/the-darker-link-between-ancient-human-sacrifice-and-our-modern-world/?utm_term=.ad86596e364aThere are only two ways to build and sustain a large and complex society. The first is oppression and slavery. The second and far harder path is to build a free society.
Religion and ProgressThe greatest obstacle to human progress is not a technological hurdle but the evil inherent in ourselves. Humans have knowledge of good and evil and with this knowledge we often choose evil.
Collectivism exists because it employs aggregated force to limit evil especially the forms of evil linked to physical violence. Collectivism is expensive and inefficient but these inefficiencies are less than the cost of unrestrained individualism. Collectivism aggregates capital for the common good and we are far from outgrowing our need for this.
1. Prehistory required the aggregation of human capital in the form of young warriors willing to fight to protect the tribe.
2. The Agricultural Age required physical capital in the form of land ownership and a State to protect the land.
3. The Industrial Age required the aggregation of monetary capital to fund large fixed capital investments and factories.
A farmer in the agricultural age could achieve some protection from theft and violence by arming himself. He could protect himself against a small hostile groups by forming defensive pacts with neighboring farmers. To defend against large scale organized violence, however, requires an army and thus a state.
In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued for the merits of centralized monarchy. He believed that only absolute monarchy was capable of suppressing the evils of an unrestrained humanity. He described in graphic wording the consequences of a world without monarchy a condition he called the state of nature.
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. - Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
There may well have been a time in human history when the absolute monarchy of Hobbes was the best available government but Hobbes was writing at the end of that era. England had been transformed from a nation almost completely conquered by the Odin worshiping
Great Heathen Army of 865 to a country that protected the legal rights of nobles in the Magna Carta of 1215 to a devoutly Christian nation that formalized the rights of judicial review for common citizens in the 1679 Habeas Corpus act. Hobbes had failed to appreciate the growth of moral capital that allowed for superior forms of government with increased freedom.
The Beginning of WisdomTop-down control fulfills its mandate when it maximizes cooperation and minimizes defection. Top-down control also uses fear, violence, and forced interaction. Top-down control is thus only morally justified if the use of those things results in an overall increase in cooperation and a reduction in defection.
The amount of top-down control required to maximize cooperation is proportional to the amount of defection prevalent in the population as well as the capability of individual defectors to do harm. Humans are morally flawed resulting in recurrent excessive concentrations of power and a general refusal to cede power. The recent human condition has been notable for the gradual progression of moral progress with either no accompanying change in top-down control or a counter intuitive increase in top-down control. When this happens the top-down control itself limits cooperation and becomes a form of defection. The situation is like a pressure cooker that eventually explodes in a rebellion resetting the top-down control to more appropriate levels.
Defection and rebellion are thus entirely separate phenomenon. The first is evil and always morally unjustifiable. The second is not only just but a moral obligation once a superior solution to top-down failure becomes available.
Decentralization paradigms are useful and necessary when resetting top-down control to more appropriate levels. However, decentralization paradigms must always be accompanied by a top-down control that maximizes cooperation alongside the decentralization paradigm.
The reality is we will always need top-down control. This may be a bitter pill to swallow for an anarchist. The need for top-down control does not go away just because we don't like it or don't want to think about it.
Religion is also top-down control, but that statement is meaningless without context. We both need top-down control and will always need top-down control. Thus ultimately the relevant question is what kind of top-down control is religion.
That answer of course varies depending on the religion we are talking about. The primitive idols worshiping pagans had horrific gods. These religions were tools of extreme top-down oppression and their extinction is welcome. See:
Pagans and Human Sacrifice.
However, belief in God especially individual belief in God coupled with a fear of God is something else entirely. A society where all individuals genuinely believed in and feared God would have very little defection. What defection did occur would be the result of ignorance not malice and even that would decline with time as knowledge progressed. An individual restrained only by a genuine belief and fear of God has complete operational autonomy he would willing choose only cooperation and never defection limited only by his knowledge of what actions constituted genuine cooperation.
Belief in God is top-down control. It is the purest manifestation of such control enabling a maximization of freedom. Rejecting God leads ultimately to higher levels of defection and consequentially less freedom.