Were religions helpful or harmful throughout history?

   It is perhaps the height of irony that, of all creatures, humans have the most capacity to understand their surroundings and at the same time the most capacity to misunderstand each other.

   Of all creatures known on Earth humans have the most capacity to communicate. Perhaps as a result humans have the most capacity to copy what they have not truly known and perhaps have not truly understood.

   The exact "cause" of trouble can be difficult to determine.

   The cause of several wars over the span of well recorded history appears to be the rise of fringe elements. Cities developed and life became more comfortable and at the same time more productive. An early example is Sumer. People living on the fringe grew in numbers for various reasons yet not as comfortable and took the city. Notice the chain of centers of civilizations. It includes Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Each were conquered by fringe people outside of the current center of civilization. Those conquerors then settled and became civilized themselves. Then the new expanded fringe on their frontiers did to them what they did to others before them. The pattern is indisputable. Rome is an exception in that its conquerors failed to establish a unified center of civilization.

   Is the cause of war then civilization? Or the fringe? It might be more correct to say that the cause of war is the combination in close proximity of a civilization and a fringe. Notice that religion is not the "cause" it perhaps once was when military expansionist leaders typically and without question operated in the name of some "god." Nor was it like the Thirty Year's War or other european conflicts between rival aristocrats who took religion as an excuse for the expansion of their personal power, or perhaps had such a crude understanding of religion as to think their military efforts were important.

   Except for a very brief time in the scope of all history, about 70 years, following Darwin's Origin of the Species ... , atheism was not a significant presence in any society. That is, not in the sense it became significant for that brief time. Eastern philosophical traditions have not typically been anthropomorphic and have been agnostic in that regard, but certainly not atheist in the western sense.

   Atheism today has none of the scientific support it had for that time yet there are many people who do not understand that. To repeat, of all creatures known on Earth humans have the most capacity to communicate. Perhaps as a result humans have the most capacity to copy what they have not truly known and have not truly understood.

   Atheists are poor and uneducated people with a superficial understanding of advanced culture, the people on the "fringe" such as it remains today. They are definitely not agnostic as people in eastern philosophical traditions. Yet they think they are "smarter" much as the Romans thought Romans were smarter for taking control of things. They are in fact so stupid that if they caused a war they would think it was someone else's fault.