People used to think murder and theft were OK before religion came along. Society is a tool to change people. People most certainly can be changed... maybe difficult for individuals but across generations a lot can happen.
Chimps are sometimes observed to be violent and murderous, either for territorial[1] or hierarchical[2] reasons.
I'm not of the belief that religion is necessarily what made murder taboo, but self-reflective consciousness and sophisticated ethical systems (especially development of an understanding of the mutual self-interest of the "golden rule"[3]) would seem to be key factors.
Find a citation yourself if it bothers you. Or you know, try to understand what im saying rather than nitpicking, pick another example like widespread racism and genocide which was once common and now isnt.
If you claim something like "society is a tool to change people" you should provide some argument to convince people. Since this is just an Internet forum, it doesn't have to be a double blind study, but claiming that murder was okay before religion just seems wrong to me. I could equally claim that society is just a natural result of people living together and being forced to share resources and does exactly nothing to change human nature, in fact, it is just an expression of human nature.
I listed more examples above, such as how racism and discrimination were once widely accepted. I don't think I need to provide a citation for basic facts such as claims of racial/genetic superiority in the era of Hitler, or historical beliefs that white people were inherently superior to dark-skinned people for hundreds of years, of how ordinary people had no qualms in keeping "sub-human" blacks as slaves.. this is all extremely common knowledge to the point where citing it would be like citing "the earth is round-ish".
I think if you take a charitable interpretation of what I'm saying as a basis for discussion and try to find things that SUPPORT the statements truth rather than counterexamples, you would see them and understand my argument. I really don't believe taking a purely adversarial stance and poking holes instead of attempting to first understand contributes the discussion usefully.
Can you tell exactly what you mean, it sounds like you are referring to a specific religion, the logic contradiction is that humans always had religions, mass murder still happened where the killed people were from other group. Also remember how the US slave owners would use religion to show black people do not have souls.
