Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right. — H.L. Mencken, journalist & critic

This would be impressive if there was a right thing to do but no one has proven that anything is right or wrong and nature allows everything to occur whatever value we put on it. Genocide and self sacrifice.

This fact demonstrates that to do good or bad and learn or not from the consequences most people do not need "divine permission" in order to survive and to thrive. So what are peculiarly "religious values" good for? — 180 Proof

What I mean is that they are acting in a quasi religious way with unsubstantiated values.

They have not transcended religious superstition and unfounded premises ,they just apparently don't care about the truth value of their claims as long as the words "God" or "gods". is not attached.

Why don't you need your statements to have truth value? The value of religious values is that they are motivational just like equally made up social values.

Neither is an issue of you are not concerned with the truth value of statements. Then you just have your subjective perception of society working. Which I assume is how you judge the success of your value claims.

I want to know that my actions are good or bad objectively and not speculatively, subjectively or arbitrarily.

The dynamics of projection continue throughout life with the earliest wounds and traumas being the raw foundations for emotional processing, especially surfacing in the experiences of being 'upset'. — Jack Cummins

I agree with this perspective. It maybe hard to falsify as a scientific theory though but you can certainly see a coherent reason why family dynamics continue to shape emotional responses and vulnerabilities through life. Thanks I like it!
But then the whole of society is projecting on to each other ad infinitum which is quite a mad thought. But I think it is helpful to know about psychodynamics and might be therapeutic.
Humans can experience and cope with a lot of trauma and I probably have a lot of defense mechanisms and coping strategies.

That said I think some instances of causing upset are more to do with quickly derailing someone and one party of the interaction is more affected than the other.

There is general trend towards cognitive and neuroscience but the core features of social dynamics and the structure of emotional processing come into the picture. — Jack Cummins

I have argued that all the psychological perspectives can be compatible in my last ever psychology essay for a degree. I also believe in folk psychology and believe that we do know how to manipulate other peoples behaviour and predict it quite skillfully.

Some people are more sensitive than others, who seem in comparison so thick-skinned. — Jack Cummins

That does seem to be the case. But is being thick skinned a successful defence mechanism? I think we do seem to rely on our emotions to reason and that emotions may be some guidance somehow towards validating our beliefs.

I like it..

I have repeated this here because its relevant.

People don't seem to comprehend the lack of truth value in issue in morality.

Morality may as well be a religion if it is just making up a system of rules and ideas to keep people happy.

But it has no truth value. No one has discovered a truth value to moral claims or moral instructions.

So moral systems are a sham at heart but people don't believe that so keep on making moral claims relentlessly.

......

So my charge is that non religious people are acting indistinguishably from religious people in a lot of their beliefs under the veneer of skepticism.

People don't seem to comprehend the lack of truth value in issue in morality.

Morality may as well be a religion if it is just making up a system of rules and ideas to keep people happy.

But it has no truth value. No one has discovered a truth value to moral claims or moral instructions.

So moral systems are a sham at heart but people don't believe that so keep on making moral claims relentlessly.

You keep forgetting that there is not an atheist worldview. — Tom Storm

That is what I am disagreeing with and the argument of this thread. I have been arguing it entails a worldview.

Yep, the traditional 'proofs' of god. Most atheist books and freethinker polemical works respond to these old things. There are thousands of pages answering these arguments. — Tom Storm

This goes against the idea of a simple disbelief in gods if you have to write thousands of words in response to arguments for God.

Atheists themselves in their writings have linked their atheism freely and closely with other beliefs. What was the motivation for notable atheist Lawrence Krauss writing the book "A universe from nothing"? It was clearly to try forestall a creator deity from having any role in existence.

I am just trying to clarify things to myself now after having years of interactions with atheists where they were arrogant, certain, ridiculed the notion of gods and took their own worldview for granted. I think that if it is acceptable to attack one set of beliefs it is acceptable to attack all of them.

I think that there are nihilist consequences to atheism in conjunction with scientific materialism that has been promoted and denied at the same time. I don't think atheists should be complacent in their atheism nor religious people complacent in their theism. It is an ongoing process of trying to understand reality and find meaning.

They are presenting God in ways that are relatively easy to disbelieve. — Bradskii

Are you including the philosophical arguments for God in this?

The cosmological argument.
The moral argument for God.
Aquinas's Five ways
The ontological argument
The argument from beauty
The argument from consciousness
The teleological argument

And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_of_God#Arguments_for_the_existence_of_God_or_gods

How many people are aware of these arguments? That has not been my experience of the online and public discourse on these issues.

The discourse seems to have changed in more recent years. though

https://medium.com/grim-tidings/scientism-and-the-downfall-of-new-atheism-919213775919

Sure. But nor could you claim that atheists could not have created a similar culture. Or even that it might have been better (less guilt, less piety, less misogamy, less ritual, less colonization, less hang ups about sex, etc). — Tom Storm

What do you think would have motivated atheists living in primitive conditions? I assume they wouldn't have churches, religious architecture and art and religious/supernatural based hierarchies. What fantasies would be generated based solely on reason? Religion is part of colourful fantastical thinking meaning we aren't restricted just to pure reason it seems.

If they reached the current conclusion of evolution by natural selection thousands of years ago what influence would that have had on them? Part of the current thinking is that there is no teleology or purpose or end goal plus the eventual heat death of the universe through entropy.

I left religion in the early 1990's in an advanced UK culture and I experienced bad nihilism after that was hard to overcome but has improved.

Even within the one religion there is no agreement about morality. — Tom Storm

The role religion had in morality is in claiming there was a moral law giver and that that entity could generate moral truths.

I would agree that we could create a pseudo moral system that benefitted some people in creating a some kind of harmonious society focused on equality and harm prevention.

But I think a lack of moral truth is still problematic in terms of resolving moral disagreements and having the feeling that you know you are doing the right thing and enforcing the good.

The way I defined morality in the post you quoted from will do for the sake of this discussion. Why do you believe, Andrew, that nature doesn't ground a definition of morality like mine that has no need of 'supernatural support'? — 180 Proof

If people don't agree on a definition of morality then that is an unresolvable problem itself with no objective arbitrer to refer to. I think it is arbitrary to pick some features of nature you like to have as your morality. Why can't you be a moral nihilist and an atheist? Why can't one be an atheist and nihilist and believe it has negative ramifications?

I don't believe the prognosis that you can be an atheist and nothing need change because that really amounts to hanging onto the coat tail of believers who believe in objective values or others coopting peoples meanings.

I am a fan of Religious Classical music through the ages and Gospel music from America. I realise that that would not have been created without religious belief. I don't assume anything we have now in society would exist without religion and its motivations and myths etc. I am not a fan of counterfactuals so I have no idea what a purely atheist history of humans would have looked like.

It seems impossible now to be an atheist uninfluenced by religious cultures and to be able to claim these cultures could have been created by atheists.

Belief seems to be a problematic area to me.

Does it matter whether or not you believe in gods? Should beliefs entail action? Do they cause actions?

Everyday we seem to be acting on a complex array of beliefs but would we behave differently with a different knowledge set? So it seems our beliefs or lack of could be very influential and our main motivating force.

I want to to decide what to do based on best evidence by my reasoning. There is a lack of knowledge and we have to invent a path for ourselves through life. Some people like Dawkins seem to want people to act as if there is no God and No afterlife.

The Mask
Speed
Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert
Sister Act 2
Being John Malkovich
True Lies
La mala educación,
The Exorcist
Inferno
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

But the effect of this moral norm on ingroup cooperation can be enhanced by claiming that homosexuals are somehow a threat to the ingroup — Mark S

What kind of threat though?

There is something very specific about the continued stigmatisation of homosexuality in various cultures. Why did the writers of the bible care about it?

It really seems very arbitrary. I don't see the creation in groups and out groups as a moral system as opposed to a hierarchy.
But I don't see what the benefit in this case is of condemning homosexuals (to the point of neuroticism) If a morality evolved from such irrationality it seems unreliable.

I think the term "God of the gaps " is deflationary and not a true representation of the type of gaps in our knowledge.
There is difference between a gap filler and a fundamental role.
My point in relationship to this thread is that disbelief in gods is a disbelief in a causal need or role for gods so it is an evaluation about the lack of need for gods. In comparison, lack of belief in santa is based on a causal role being completely filled.
I am agnostic based on my beliefs about the explanatory limitations of current paradigms.
I think it is large claim to make that physicalism science will one day satisfactorally explain everything.

I generally agree.

I think the attempt to deconstruct sex and gender has just left a lot of confused people.

So I start a thread to celebrate women and immediately people express skepticism about the existence of any real traits of women. Imagine how confusing this must be for younger people?

It's like no one could even use the principle of charity to humor the thread topic but went straight into the process of dismantling sex and Gender.

I think you can compare The case of Santa Claus and The case of God in this situation.

Parents sometimes tell their children that Santa Claus came and left them presents. Later on they admit they left the presents not Santa. Santa was playing the causal role of presents giver but was adequately replaced by another explanation/cause.

I don't think the same can be said about God. I think there are substantial Gaps in our knowledge that seem unlikely to be explained by science like First cause and the infinite regress of causes and issues like consciousness, mental representation, emergent properties etc.

I think it is a straw man to present God in a way that seems easy to disbelieve like portraying God as the Flying Spaghetti monster which ridicules the notion of God so people forget about the more sophisticated arguments like causal role/explanatory Gaps.

Rather, I am first reporting an empirical observation that virtually all past and present cultural moral norms can be explained as parts of cooperation strategies — Mark S

What about moral norms such as the prohibition of homosexuality, the acceptance of slavery, the inequality of the sexes, the application of the death penalty and so on.

As for morality, why do we need reasons before we do good? — Banno

We need to know we are doing good and we don't and possibly can't. If I judged people based on my own moral intuitions it would condemn a lot of human activities which is one reason we need to resolve moral disputes.

If you insist that every event has a cause, then you might at least allow that the cause be identified. — Banno

I am insisting ona causal explanation which is somewhat different.

For example I could say "I studied social psychology because I am really interested in humans" That is what gets called a "reason giving explanation". It is causally satisfactory without positing a physical mechanism or strict mechanical substrate. It is also compelling and probably true. But it is not committed on the explanation being reduced to physics.

The world is a human perception
— Andrew4Handel
It is? So now you side with Bishop Berkeley. You'll find precious few who concur with such idealism — Banno

Stating that perception is constructivist and indirect does not amount to a commitment to idealism. But it is reality because how else can we form any knowledge about a reality without consciousness and perceptions?
Even physics posits the invisible sub atomic world is not similar or veridical to our perceptions.

Our model of causation is not dependent on there being a world.
— Andrew4Handel
How does that work? — Banno

Similar to how Maths and logic works using concepts. The concepts may be dependent on an external physical world but it is not clear how.
2+2 = 4 seems true in any possible world .

What is the supposed argument here? That because we "negotiate the environment successfully", everything must have a cause? How is that supposed to work? — Banno

It is evidence of the success of causal reasoning and helps us not to die. So it is by no means a banal process.

He addresses the issues you raise about morality reasonably but without distinction. — Tom Storm

I think he helped set the tone of the debate with this type of comment:

“I challenge you to find one good or noble thing which cannot be accomplished without religion.”

This is an example of him taking for granted that there are good and noble things which the moral nihilist is challenging.

It helped other atheists assert you can be moral without God without arguments. When the question really is does morality itself make any sense without God.

↪Andrew4Handel So nature itself isn't grounds enough for natural beings to conceive of and practice morality (i.e. eusocial cooperation strategies). Why? — 180 Proof

It depends on how you are defining morality. What does morality mean and where did you learn the notion from?
You seem to be assuming morality refers to something in the way people think God refers to something. We can use terms that don't refer to anything or don't have concrete references.

I grew up in a Plymouth brethren church and we had numerous moralistic rules. No radio. No Television no make up. No shopping on Sunday and so on. That is why I became a moral nihilist on leaving because I realised you can create numerous arbitrary oppressive rules under the guise of morality without a coherent reason but when you try and justify them they turn out to be dogmas imposed by force or coercion of some sort. Even the most mild seeming diktat becomes an imposition of someone else's values.

There may well be a lot of piss-poor atheists out there. — Tom Storm

Would you class Christopher Hitchens as one of these because he appeared to take this stance

Russell suggested the counterexample: each person around me has a mother, therefore the human race as a whole has a mother. — Banno

Do we not all have an ancestral mother/female in common?
This is not usually how people reason though in my experience.

They have a rational common sense notions of causality, where they use reasonable assumptions and not wild extrapolations to negotiate the environment successfully . So Russell appears to be (as was his style) straw manning the general publics reasoning ability.

Cause takes place within the world. There's no demand that the world as a whole be caused. it might, but it might not. — Banno

It is not clear where causes take place. The world is a human perception and causation is a human perception. Our model of causation is not dependent on there being a world. For example we don't have a causal explanation for consciousness but we believe that it is in the world. What we want is an explanation of how X (The brain maybe) causes Y (Consciousness) we are not committing ourselves to wider picture of what exists in totality. Just looking for causal coherence and why X and Y occur or come to exist somewhere in some form.

God is supposed to rid us of this by being uncaused. That's blatant question begging. — Banno

The only relevance of gods here is that they are attempts at explanations and to some extent causal explanations.

We have numerous theories about who Jack The Ripper is but none of them are likely to be true but they are attempts to explain. So we look for an explanation of the Whitechapel murders we don't look for a non explanation. We don't settle for a well maybe nobody caused these murders.

So either atheists are not looking for an explanation for existence. Or they don't care or they believe science will one day explain reality mechanically or something.

...accept their own moral values on flimsy grounds...
— Andrew4Handel

What grounds are they, then, that are shared by all atheists? That's a pretty shallow accusation. — Banno

Initially most atheists I have spoken to have accepted morality on no grounds whatsoever.

They just believe in moral entities and moral facts. They don't even feel they have to defend where there moral values came from.

You can't really shore up atheism. Scientism maybe. — Tom Storm

Atheism would be a less compelling stance without evolutionary theory because how would people explain the existence of billions of plants and animals etc?

Now evolution is considered to have explained biology now we have the problem of explaining minds. And some how the most prominent eliminative materialist and consciousness skeptics are prominent atheists. That is why I think they are trying to prop up atheism.

Mental properties fit the bill of things we considered supernatural. They are invisible, you can't see thoughts and dreams or words and beliefs in the brain yet they somehow cause actions. So they are ripe to be dismantled or to be deflated in the pursuit of expunging the supernatural.

Consider: if "God" is conceived of as "uncaused" or "self-caused", why can't we conceive of what you call "the existence of reality" as uncaused or self-caused but without the non-evident middle man-"Creator" (as per Occam's Razor) instead? :chin: — 180 Proof

I am not personally advocating God or gods as explanations. I am only asking for an explanation.

If there is a breakdown of casualty that undermines everything including reason and laws.

It is the equivalent of researching your ancestors and finishing at your great grandmother as if she appeared from nowhere for no reason. That would be an existential explanatory gap compromise your understanding of your self. We don't need to know our ancestors to assume they existed because of causality.

I personally don't think a god will appear as an explanation. But what a god stands for in an explanation is the equivalent of what a human stands to in the explanation of a piano. We created the piano. We are intelligent and can be asked about how we did it, our motives etc. We are the things that have, reasons, thoughts, mentally represent, use symbolic logic and so on. We can never ask the matter of the universe why it exists but we can ask intelligences like ourselves. It is the classic tension between the meaningless mechanism of mater and symbolic thought and mental representation in philosophy

Dawkins himself, explaining in no uncertain terms, that your comment above is wrong. My guess is that you haven't read the book. — Bradskii

Is that a quote from The Selfish gene? Because I can quote from the Selfish Gene to prove my points.

This is how he starts the book:

"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If
superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the
level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?'"

Based on this comment he appears to be asserting that evolution is the only way for life to come into existence. That doesn't follow even if evolution is taken to be true. Because hypothetically we can now possibly make life from scratch quickly using the latest bio technique but he is clearly arguing for the predominance of the evolutionary/natural selection explanation as the sole and dominant explanation and not for a flexible less dogmatic position.

He then goes own:

"We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there
a meaning to life.' What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent
zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that
question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"

Once again he is arguing for the preeminence and complete explanatory power of the evolutionary perspective.

1. Why do you "believe the existence of reality asks for an explanation"? — 180 Proof

Because all around me things have causes. Cause and effect works and things don't pop into existence for no reason.

2. Does this "explanation" beg the question (i.e. also requires its own explanation)? — 180 Proof

There is no requirements on the explanation other than it explains something that clearly needs explaining.

We may find an infinite regress of reasons but we may not. However atheism is a non explanation in the face of something that is subject to reason and to forms of inquiry and explanation.

This is one of the reasons I don't describe myself as an atheist and came into conflict with atheists because I believe they misrepresent and under estimate the problems.

They make heavy attacks on Christianity but accept their own moral values on flimsy grounds and are seemingly unaware of things like the atrocities of state atheism that I have highlighted on this thread whilst making a big deal about religion causes wars and prejudice.

When I left Christianity I went quickly to nihilism because I accepted the problems of replacing a religious world view with anything meaningful.

I have edged back from nihilism since doing a philosophy and psychology degree and realising what we don't know and what are open questions. I had to read articles by Dawkins and Dennett as part of books we read on the implications of Darwinism and in Consciousness studies where you also encounter conscious state skeptics The Churchland's among others. That is where I learnt atheist were attacking things like conscious states, meaning and values in order to shore up atheism and pushing for determinism.

I think lack of evidence is a good reason for disbelief.

But what counts as evidence for God?

I think the burden of proof is on the atheist because something exists rather than nothing and I believe the existence of reality asks for an explanation. God is one explanation. Atheism means not believing in a creator of reality without a feasible alternate explanation.

If someone comes to believe that there are no mysteries about reality (consciousness/infinity/existence etc) than they may feel their atheism is justified. That is where atheism teams up with evolution and the big bang to claim there is no longer any role for God in reality which I view as faulty and more of a faith position.

I was part of this in Hungary, between roughly 1960 and 1972, when I was 6 to 18 years of age.

There were no public executions of priests, and there were no jailing anyone because they were religious — god must be atheist

But there was in other countries I don't know about Hungary but the rest is well documented. There is footage of churches being destroyed and priests being executed. But your background certainly sounds very interesting.

"According to some sources, the total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range around 12 to 20 million.[8][9] At least 106,300 Russian clergymen were executed between 1937 and 1941."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union

In relation to this thread topic atheism has gone beyond being a simple lack of belief or simple disbelief and enforced.

It was not a "follow atheism or die" process. — god must be atheist

See my above info.

The overall point is that there is a lot of evidence of atheism going beyond the no burden of proof simple lack of belief and My overall point was that not only has atheism being tried as a belief (state atheism) it is has failed and caused lots of harm which does not make atheism the less harmful stance of religious versus atheists.

But I have not heard of agnostic atrocities so until I do i would hold that agnosticism is the way forward.

You see, Andrew4Handel, the knife cuts both ways. The atheists at least stop at screaming and spluttering anti-religious sentiments. — god must be atheist

I am not advocating religion. I tend to advocate agnosticism. I assume you are ruling out communist atrocities as being unrelated to atheism?

Doing an atrocity not in the name of gods could be defined as an atheist atrocity (tongue in cheek).

There are atrocities like the two world wars that weren't religious. They aren't the fault atheism either but they don't support the idea that secularism will lead to better things.

"Soviet Union

State atheism (gosateizm, a syllabic abbreviation of "state" [gosudarstvo] and "atheism" [ateizm]) was a major goal of the official Soviet ideology.[49] This phenomenon, which lasted for seven decades, was new in world history.[50] The Communist Party engaged in diverse activities such as destroying places of worship, executing religious leaders, flooding schools and media with anti-religious propaganda, and propagated "scientific atheism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism

If morality is all about cooperation strategies then why do you need to use the term morality at all. Why not just say what are the best cooperation strategies? No problems with that goal.

But It makes the moral labels superfluous and is not what people mean when they make a moral claim.

It sounds like trying to apply scientific interference into human behaviour to produce desired outcomes but it does not sound anything like a morality but also it sounds very manipulative.

The whole idea is like discovering what we thought of as morality was just self serving AKA Dawkins selfish genes. My idea of morality, that I thought others shared, was to do with good character reflected in your actions. Compassion etc. A sense of duty and empathy.

I thought the only point of religions was to give meaning to life. If life has no innate meaning then peoples goals are going to be subjective and arbitrary. I personally see no reason to mindlessly reproduce our genes. I think hopefully people that do want to have children are not mainly focused on spreading their genes but maybe they are? But if you appreciate sunsets hopefully that is not just another strategy to entice you to replicate.

Aping our own heritage? — Vera Mont

You seem to be doing the same thing as 180Proof and selecting natural behaviours you have a preference for. But you are not being explicit enough.

However if humans are apart of nature or our behaviour is natural and if we are genetic all of our behaviour. Religion is a result of evolution and genocide.

It amounts to you saying you have a preference for certain things that happen and want more things like that to happen.

A Good time for this Dawkins Quote again:

Are you advocating a return to nature? Taking inspiration from nature or transcending nature?

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”"

It was a combination.

(I don't think you've had time to read all those articles.) — Vera Mont

Do I have to read the articles? I am well aware of pro-social animal behaviours but we are talking about humans and their well documented history. Humans aren't lemurs or wolf packs.

Maybe you are invoking a naturalistic fallacy where you believe that we should return to a state a of nature where things will be Good and natural or that things found in nature are good?

I don' think aping other animals resolves the issue. Evolution is supposed to have taken away the notion of teleology and purpose and an animals behaviour is just supposed to encourage gene replication and genes have no idea what we are doing.

Let's try it for 2000 years and find out! — Vera Mont

They have tried it under communist regimes and in revolutionary France it could be argued to have had a worse effect than religion with a higher death toll. As I mentioned in the evolution thread the Nazis embraced the survival of the fittest which was invoked in their Aktion T4 programme ("Alles leben is kampf" )

AKT4 was where gas chambers were first used to murder hundreds of thousands of disabled people and later adopted to make the killing of millions of Jews and others easier.

We don't know where society is going. Or Whether we'll be here in a hundred years but currently it works on the based as a multi-faith and no faith democracy where lots of diverse groups have an input. I am not sure which aspects of societal "progress" atheists can lay claim to. But they seem to want to blame religion for everything bad and assume all progress is some how linked to atheism or secularism-rationalism.

Are you referring to cooperation among animals?

No one is denying that as far as I am aware we are talking about human societies and the history of humanity. We are living and communicating on a different plain to animals because we have language and ideas etc.
There is brutality among animals but also nothing to scale of what some would describe as human depravity.
We are the species most in need of a sound moral compass.

Some Christians fought against slavery 1600 years after the mainstream churches endorsed it. — Vera Mont

I didn't claim otherwise I was just pointing out the some opposed it including the most prominent abolitionists whereas David Hume philosopher and famer religious skeptic supported it.

"David Hume advised his patron, Lord Hertford to buy a slave plantation, facilitated the deal and lent £400 to one of the principal investors. And when criticised for racism in 1770, he was unmoved, writes Dr Felix Waldmann"

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/david-hume-was-brilliant-philosopher-also-racist-involved-slavery-dr-felix-waldmann-2915908

I am attacking the false dichotomy about the conduct of the religious and non religious and whether a society without religion would be more fact based, rational and humane.

Total fabrication. All those existed before gods were invented. All those existed long before humans walked on two legs. — Vera Mont

Can you provide evidence for this claim most human societies that have been recorded have been religious, or superstitious, had gods of some sort.

Lots of things like family and weddings and Christmas have very modern components that we mistakenly think are old traditions.

"In most cultures of the world, the beginning of family history is set in creation myths."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_family