I appreciate your view, but tribalism only promotes that good within the tribe. If a rival tribe is moving in on your turf, it is often conveyed as “righteousness” to perform any number of wrongs to those rivals that would be verboten among members of the same tribe. If you succeed in killing them or running them off, your tribe is more ecologically secure as a result.
In short, tribes may not kill within the tribe (aside from occasional leadership disputes and deliberate tribal culling when over-large) but they have displayed unquestioned willingness to kill members of other tribes for the same reason you provide - common benefit. This isn’t even limited to people. Dolphins and chimps have been documented displaying the same behavior.
“This guy is my kinsman. We will help provide for each other. That guy over there is stealing food from our land! Get him!” said in a tone of righteous indignation
Tribalism, verily, is blood-soaked.
Sorry, I’m in a bit of a hurry, but there’s something that I wanted to contribute.
A great many things, including morality, can be understood by following your line of reasoning. And by understanding why some things survive, and some don’t.
Our ancestors likely began as small familial groups. With shared histories, experiences, and codes of conduct. These shared identities are what held these families together as a group. But when faced with an adversary, a group…in the majority of cases, is only as strong as the numbers that it can bring to bear against that adversary. The greater the numbers, the greater the likelihood of success. Thus a group’s strength, and its survivability, is measured by it’s ability to instill a shared sense of identity. Marked in almost all cases by a shared sense of truth and morality as well. Not only is such unity necessary for the groups protection from outside agents, but such shared morality also acts as an arbiter of internal conflicts as well. Keeping the group together, and protecting it from fragmentation and the vulnerability that such fragmentation ultimately produces. The survival of a group is determined by its size, and its size is determined by its ability to unify people under a shared identity or code of morals and truths. Thus as groups evolved, they carried with them the same set of moral truths. Because such truths facilitated the survival of the group.
Thus family groups, gave rise to tribal groups, which gave rise to ethnic groups, which gave rise to cultural groups, which gave rise to what were historically some of the most powerful groups of all…religious groups. Each group successively adhering to the same underlying set of moral standards, from which it had arisen. For the simple reason that those standards worked. Subgroups occasionally deviated from the larger group but never completely abandoned its underlying moral codes.
Religions were successful because they could unify people across families, and tribes, and ethnicities, and cultures. And thus they could create a larger group than could be created by any of the other groups alone. But religions carried with them a set of moral standards that weren’t of their own creating, but were instead a product of those groups which had preceded them.
Morals aren’t the product of religion, or God, they’re the product of survival. The larger the group that you can hold together under a given set of moral standards, then the more likely you were to survive. Standards that work…equal survival…standards that don’t…equal annihilation.
This being the case, it’s easy to see how religion prospered, but it’s also difficult to see how it will survive with its fundamental premises being subjected to greater and greater skepticism. Religion should in some sense be applauded for what it’s passed on to us, but it should also be recognized for what it is, a means of unifying one group of people against another, and amongst themselves.
I don’t think that religion needs to die, but I think that it needs to change. It needs to realize that the morals that they gave us are more important than the Gods that they gave us.
))