Excuse me? Can you conceive of this happening in the future, after the Armageddon like event?

[drystan]

Humans are hardwired to love. Remember Cast Away? That gay movie where Tom Hanks gets ship wrecked alone and makes friend with a volley ball with a face painted on it? Well, what if a disaster hit and there were only about 1,000 humans left on the Earth but they were all separated by various obstacles? Like the ocean, regions that are completely contaminated because of radio activity, or other dangerous things that are impossible for one person to surmount on their own. If you were one of these last humans, what do you think you would fall in love with? An animal because it's at least living and responds to you, or an inanimate object like a chair or a frying pan? Do you think humans could ever be fooled to loving other things in today's society? Social learning is very predominate in the way humans learn to act and behave in society, the harshest punishments are imprisonment when we remove people from society, time outs as a child, even the death penalty is done in order to remove a human from the society. Do you think that in a place like North Korea where it's isolated and tightly controlled by an insane dictator, humans could over generations be made to love things like animals, rather than other humans?
Do you think that humans truly have no limits when they're within a socially engineered environment and all of the reinforcements are just right? Like a dead animal that can be made to twitch and writhe about through electric shock? What if instead of Nazi Germany, modern day North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Jim Jones island paradise, and other nightmare lands like that, society was engineered for benevolent purposes? What do you imagine that would be like?

Religion is without question the most powerful tool used to engineer society. It's been used almost since humans began to construct civilization. But I'm convinced that there must be something that can be just as well adapted to out psychological needs and desires as religion, but without all of the dogma and superstition.

[ahanu]

As corrrupt and screwed up as religious societies are, the ones with no religion are even more screwed up and corrupt.

You have to choose the lesser of two evils. Religion is about doing the right thing, even when nobody is looking. Lack of Religion is about doing anything you want because you know nobody is looking and you don't care.