The thing that really worries me about these kinds of beliefs in some kind of a god or gods is that they can provide a get-out clause for existential risks to humanity. If this physical universe is just one manifestation of existence, then there's less to worry about because there will be some kind of existence afterwards if you screw it up. But in my view the universe is all there is, and it very definitely doesn't "care" if humanity cooks the planet in a way that makes human life impossible. If that's your view, the first priority of every single person should be to work towards stabilising the climate and reduce our impact on the enviromnent, but instead we have shiny-eyed millenarians piling billions of dollars into things like AI that could be much more productively used in funding an energy transition. (And don't get me started on the idea that AI will help that transition - we already know what we need to do, that isn't complicated, even if the route is complex).

I think you're missing the historical context of how the "life after death" idea served as an utility, in many religions.

We today have laws and moral separated from religion and institutions that both teaches it to the young citizen and uphold it. But that wasn't the case for vast majority of the history.

How would you convince a tribal person that can't perceive something beyond "good for me & my family/tribe is all justifications required" to act collaboratively beyond that view? Especially if that attitude is also causing suboptimal behavior around him.

Introduce the concept of "good behavior" but there's no guarantee he will follow. Even if you introduced law & punishment you really have no efficient way to enforce it, back in the days.

So you introduce the idea that "if you behave bad,(or your children does) you'll suffer beyond your death".

Just so happen this simple yet powerful idea don't really scale with a complex world

>If that's your view, the first priority of every single person should be to work towards stabilising the climate and reduce our impact on the enviromnent

But why though? If that's what you believe and there's nothing more, we know the sun is going to explode and destroy everything and an asteroid impact is likely to happen that destroys even sooner than that, so why does that matter?

I'm not sure you can blame this on deities. Nazis and Stalinists (especially the latter) were very atheistic. Both at some level thought they're building a better world, literally by murdering millions of people and enslaving orders of magnitude more.

[dead]

Religion is just one of the excuses/covers used to grab more power and/or shiny baubles by psychopatic people. And there are the ones who just want to see others suffer no matter what. Most of the people that are left don't feel like lifting a finger unless it directly endangers their own comfortable life.

Call me cynical, but I haven't seen any improvement in human nature in 50 years.