Consider a philosophy:
Believe nothing; verify everything.
The consideration then is how is anything verified. Belief can come from several things, including a strong unconquerable desire for something to be true. If unconquerable, then it becomes a near hopeless battle to overcome. Otherwise belief is a factor of three types of influence.
Type A Influence: Obvious experiential verification. You witness it first hand and the experience leaves no doubt. You believe it's raining because you feel it falling on you. The concrete drive is hard because you fell down and experienced it. Man's experience is full of type A influence.
Type B Influence: Non-experiential "facts" learned from "authoritative" sources, such as schools, trusted texts, parents, teachers, accounts by those we trust, doctrines of one's chosen church, and "sacred writings". It also results from intellectual conclusions and efforts at logical derivations. The bulk of religious beliefs, or at least that which is no longer individual but shared, come from type B Influence.
Type C Influence: An experiential influence granted exclusively or esoterically to only a privileged person. This is an influence that would be type A, in that it's experiential, but unique in that one is privy to the experience personally, or is chosen by an entity to witness or gain privileged knowledge. The interesting thing about type C influence is that the moment one attempts to pass an experience on to another it cannot be passed on as type C, but is then type B.
Much of religious teachings claim a root in type C influence, such as the Jewish beliefs in Abraham's and Moses' unique relationship with God, the Christian teachings from Jesus' disciples accompanied by the guidance of the promised 'comforter'. Regardless, a religion that has become organized to the point that it's shared 'beliefs', it becomes a matter of written systematic statements and rhetoric. It becomes exclusively type B influence.
Now if you apply the beginning philosophy "believe nothing, verify everything", the type B influence is abandoned leaving only type A and type C. Still there is the belief mentioned earlier that is strictly a product of desire. It's the acceptance of a concept because to you it is too beautiful or wonderful to discard. You can try with all your intellectual might, and it won't budge. It has more to do with the heart than it does the intellect. The interesting thing about what is heart instead of mind, is that in the long run the mind looses. Intellect is but a tool for something much deeper, yet sometimes we work only on intellect and forget about working on and conditioning what's much deeper and more motivating.
It's for sure that using such philosophy I can't promote any Type C influence as truth. So, we'll try only for type A. The first thing we've got to investigate is what we are. We are an animal. That's verifiable and indisputable. Under the philosophy there is nothing more assumed. Okay, as an animal, how are we differentiated from all the other animals. A soul? That's not verifiable. What is verifiable is that we have an intellectuality and the ability to exercise it to a certain degree of effectiveness not enjoyed by other animals. That's verifiable and indisputable. And, what does that intellectuality encompass but the intellectual tendency toward drawing conclusion (often without sufficient evidence), and the ability to recognize in others what we have come to recognize within ourselves, including the traits we try hardest to suppress. We rationalize, conclude, and systemize, and being gregarious animals we also share these great and wonderful formulas.... until suddenly we have another fully systematic,rule based, dogmatic religion. The thing to recognize about humans is they have the intellect but not the capacity to use it properly socially. The last few hundred years of the thousands of years of existence has permitted some stumbling around technically and impressive intellectual achievements have been made. Socially and spiritually we've attempted to apply the same intellectual formulas of developing systems, doctrines, rules, laws and theories. There are some common elements or parallels in the physical world and the intangible emotionally charged human psyche. The differences between them though are obscure and hopelessly hidden from the systematic formula seeking tool we call the intellect.
The question, "would the world be better off" cannot be answered for it's a "what if" question of something that simply can't be for the animal or it's characteristics, at least not as far as group dynamics are concerned, and the 'world' definitely operates under group dynamics. Perhaps a better question would be of a personal nature. "Would you be better off?
