There is an argument that human beings have progressed beyond their need for religion. This is basic Atheist logic; the more than a little self-admiring idea that they are so evolved and intelligent that they no longer require the “mythology” of religion in order to be moral and ethical people. It is too late in the history of humanity to continue to still believe in religion.
This is amusing to me because the exact opposite is the case. It is far too late in human history to make an argument for atheism; and I mean that quite literally.
You simply cannot make an argument that people can be moral and ethical without religious belief today because the entire concept of morality and ethics has been inherited and integrated into society from religious belief itself. You cannot show me a single non-religious person who is moral and ethical independent from religious belief; it is literally impossible. The entire society in which they developed, no matter what society it is, is predicated on concepts of right and wrong that were derived from religion. To say that human beings could have developed into moral and ethical individuals in the absence of any religious belief or influence, is an absurd proposition that is a technical impossibility to prove. Can someone be moral and ethical without personally believing in God? Sure, but that is a different question.
It is essentially asking, “can someone behave as a religious person, possess religious values, but reject the religious framework from which that behaviour and those values are derived?” The answer to that is “yes”, but can they also pretend that this behaviour and these values were derived independently as a result of their own rational deliberation? Did they construct their own definition of good behaviour and moral values in some sort of vacuum, and it is mere coincidence that they mirror the moral principles of religious people? Of course not.
It is like someone who has been taught to play the piano saying that they could have not only taught themselves to play the piano, but that they could have in fact invented pianos. Well, maybe. But there is no possible way to know that, because pianos were already invented and you were already taught how to play them; so it is simply farcical to hypothesize that you could have reached the point to which you have been brought had you not already been brought there.
The idea that religion is a belief that has been forced upon people is also similarly preposterous. Specific doctrines, yes, but theism itself? Absolutely not. Rather it is only atheism that has ever needed to be imposed upon people in order for it to prevail in society at all. Little children, as soon as they are able to articulate such a concept, and without any instruction from their elders, believe in God by default, not by imposition. The entire history of the human species is theist, and there is simply no evidence to support the argument that tens of thousands of years ago someone invented the concept of God out of thin air and we have been mindlessly adhering to it ever since. Indeed, history itself bluntly disproves the suggestion that human beings could have developed without belief in God, because, well, quite obviously, we didn’t.