If you remove money and religion from the world, would all its problems disappear?

There's a huge problem with all of these 'brave new world' ideas.    They all assume everyone is equal in the first place and with equal good intentions.    Unfortunately, there will always be between 2-5% psychopaths and sociopaths in a population.     There will always be disabled people and there will always be thieves and criminals too and all these different groups will utterly corrupt any civilisation so the whole hippy-trippy love-fest will breakdown into a dog-eat-dog Thunderdome.     

Some countries seem to be relatively successful at creating fairer societies with less exploitation and greed in evidence. Scandinavia always seem to be ahead of everyone else in this regard. 

Maybe not money but greed and the lust for more power are certainly behind a good many social ills, the UK and the US being prime examples of where things go wrong under a predatory capitalism. 

As for religion, organised religion especially when combined with the power of the State, seem to create yet another means for oppression. Not sure I would conflate religion with spirituality though. 

Read a good book recently by a Fabian Scheidler on this very topic, pretty well. My potted answervowes to The Spirit Level too, that recognises a direct link between all forms of inequality and social distress, though the fact that inequality and social ills should go together should scarcely be surprising. Scheidler was inspired in turn by Lewis Mumford, and Marx, the latter of whom while being an atheist was nevertheless held up as a guru possessing the One Great Truth, alas

Your doing jobs for others is a totally capitalist barter system - what happens if you have no skills or are just bone idle?   Who would be forced to give up their valuable / marketable skills to support you at their own expense?      

Creating drugs doesn't just happen - it requires massive amounts of cash to pay for many researchers, clean rooms and equipment to discover drugs that then go into expensive trials with animals and eventually on to humans and of those, 90% fail for some reason or another - adverse effects, not effective or maybe people are intolerant of it.      Who absorbs all those costs?     People doing for the love / fun of it?

Religion is all about extracting money with fear - always has been, always will be.     Pretending to be virtuous is now an epidemic where anyone can make a fake profile and get followers online - they're just as fake as organised religion and all doing it for money.

Plastic and AJ, I get what you’re saying, but I think there is another way. If we take your example of sharpening knives. Let’s say you are great a sharpening knives, and enjoy the work, but i am terrible at sharpening them, but I can do painting and decorating. You would sharpen my knives and I would paint your lounge. The next day you would sharpen knives for the local shop keeper and I would paint their kitchen. We would both get supplies in return.

Across town everyone would do jobs they enjoy for other people, in exchange for jobs they don’t enjoy or don’t have skills to do.

You wouldn’t need a capitalist society to develop new products and create innovation because people would do it for enjoyment. Scientist would create drugs for the personal reward of helping others etc. etc.

The idea of religion and Gods was created at time when people didn’t know better. People looked into the sky and said “what is this glowing orb and what does it mean, what are the white dots in the sky when it’s dark?” And philosophical people like, lets call him Jesus, gave reasoned explanations and created stories of powerful gods creating universes. Later on these ideas were used to control people with fear of getting struck down by lighting if you made god angry, or the idea god could send great floods if people questioned him.

We know better now though, science has shown another truth. Religion preaches about hunger and homelessness across the world, while sitting on trillions of pounds in land, building, precious stones and metals. Why not sell all that and solve these issues. Not to mention, that without money None of these issues would exist anyway.

It's also easier to split a £20 for change......  

sorry sheep and goats in my wallet, i had a picture form immediately, very funny made me laugh --- sorry I know I'm being silly 

i wish u well

It seems people have forgotten that bartering or 'capitalism' is the *natural* way of doing business.   

Thousands of years ago, if I showed a talent for sharpening knives, it's more sensible for me to spend my days sharpening knives for the village.    Unfortunately, that would mean I couldn't tend my fields so I would need to be 'paid' in a 'currency' of things I could swap for what I needed like goats or corn or  bread.      If I was good at my 'job',  the village would be more productive so I could start to pick and choose whose knives I sharpened first - so I could 'charge' more for my skills.     I would become 'wealthy' as I have the monopoly on sharpening.

That would encourage people to set up in competition with me - the customer would choose who did his knives - my expensive skills or a cheaper, faster, lower quality competitor.     Market forces would soon find the balance.

Obviously, goats and cows are hard to carry around in my wallet so money is just the representation of those valuable things.  

So no, I don't think you can get rid of money.

Similarly, people seem to universally need hope - and as that is normally wrapped up and delivered in an organised, pre-packaged religion, I don't think you can get rid of it.

Years ago, a ruler would have an heir - and a spare.    Both heirs would want each other dead to clear their path to the throne.

The youngest would usually escape into the church to gain power against the sibling.      Both of these maximise their revenue streams - one by threatening direct horrible pain and misery if the people didn't pay their taxes while alive and the other threatening eternal horrible pain and misery if they didn't 'invest' for their afterlife.      

The little people do not ever declare war on other countries - it's always the power-mad rulers - and often 'religious' wars are just one family fighting a distant branch of their own family to regain wealth stolen by the others.

In my opinion, no. The world's problems aren't inherently caused by any of these things, they are caused by people that misuse, abuse, or otherwise capitalise on an unfair advantage or opportunity.

Yes, terrible things have been done in the name of religion, but religious organisations have done good things too. Some people find a lot of comfort in religion.

Same goes for the arguments for and against capitalism. Capitalism had driven incredible advances in technology and society in general, but some people take it too far, putting profit before people and amassing obscene amounts of wealth.

I think all problems can really be traced back to human greed, whether it be for wealth, power, notoriety, or something else.

 "If you remove money and religion from the world, would all its problems disappear?"

...No.

(But I like Your Thread so much that I  'signed in' again so that I could "Like" Your Thread.     !

Questions like this are a matter the Answers for which are best found out for Oneself... which is why I 'liked' this Thread.

Very true! You would think people should go to work in that industry because they want to help people, not to make 25 million a year. I wouldn't be surprised either if that CEO does barely anything and delegates everything to everyone else.

I see your Rave scene and public transport, and I raise you, the entire pharmaceutical industry! The CEO of Johnson & Johnson is on an estimated $25M a year...What the hell. It’s should be not for profit.

I definitely think it would be better if we had no religion. Far better would be if everyone could have philosophical debate and exchange of ideas, being open minded. It's the indoctrination and being rigid that makes religion cause wars and other problems.

I don't think money is a bad thing in itself. What's bad is how we let most things be turned into a moneymaking scheme. To give an example the rave scene when it started was mostly a peaceful, feel good thing. If you were into it, you enjoyed it. Then it all became tired to buying tickets, you had security, so it became more exclusive, people were excluded, security could be heavyhanded, it took a lot of the joy out of it.

Or public transport. It should just be there to provide a service to help us run the economy. But governments have let it be run for profit, when I don't see any reason why really. The providers are not clever, they're not innovative, they're not taking risks. They're just running a service and overcharging people for it.

My view is I don't mind people making money if they're doing something most people can't. So if you're a builder, fair enough, most people can't build a house, you should be able to make more money than most people. But a train company, I don't see why they should. It's building the train and the infrastructure that's the clever bit. Running it is is a lot more straightforward.

All problems wouldn't disappear but life would be better.

The problem is some people would always want more.....   And some would take it by force.