If, for some unknown reason, all structured religions were outlawed, what do you consider would fill the void? Please exclude underground continuations as with Catholicism under Protestantism in C17th England.
Great, well-considered, response Mordant. Thanks. The search for a reason seems to be a constant with human identity. The methodology simply changes and becomes more refined and systematic.
I think imposing areligion would result in massive protests and covert and open disobedience. For this to be a meaningful question, one would have to magically make religion and the memory of its influences vanish.
What would happen then in my view is that people would quickly invent new religions. They probably wouldn't be as fanciful and harmful as the current ones, as reason and science HAVE made SOME inroads. But they would still have fundamentalist / authoritarian factions and they'd be delusional and harmful enough.
The only corrective for religion is for children to be taught critical thinking from the cradle, because the human mind isn't optimized for critical thinking, it must be trained. What's intuitive for the human mind is a crude, quick sorting out of things in your field of awareness as "threat" and "not-threat". The latter is irrelevant, the former has primacy. And these determinations are subjective, emotional, and often quite irrational. And based on bad assumptions and misperceptions that can only be corrected and understood for what they are, through rational inquiry according to a system like the scientific method.
Humanity has spent thousands of years clawing its way out of a very deep hole of superstition and fear ... and it isn't done yet. I'm not looking for religion to be forbidden in some fantasy that's a mirror image of some theist's notion of a theocracy. I'm looking for people to voluntarily let go of humanity's childhood, and that's going to take a very long time. And the path to that is not the abolition of religion, but the gradual reduction of religion to irrelevancy as people recognize that it's not cutting it -- for them personally, or for society.