Exactly how "perfect" would a vegan world actually be?

[aroneous]

When we look at the current state of the world, and all of the terrible things happening, like wars, racism, animal agriculture, corporate greed and abuse, political corruption, etc., it may be pretty tempting for us to think of a vegan world as one where absolutely none of this happens, imagining it to be some kind of frutiger aero-esque utopia where everyone gets along perfectly well, no one tries to take unfair advantage of anyone else, and where humans generally have their priorities straight when it comes to helping each other and determining how to reduce our collective suffering in the most effective ways possible. As vegans, we think of ourselves as being on the right side of history, which we certainly are, but it's easy for us to extrapolate that to imagining a vegan world as one that is perfect in every possible way, perhaps partly as a way to distance ourselves from a lot of the crap we see going on around us.

To be clear, I do believe a vegan world -- by this, I mean a world of people who are ethically motivated to be vegan, not just plant-based out of necessity -- would be several orders of magnitude better than the current one on almost every front. I do not think we would have wars, and rates of violence and abuse would be astronomically lower (though still not non-existent), simply because, outside of certain misanthropic cases, an individual's moral concern for the well being of animals often sets a pretty low limit for the kind of harm they are willing to inflict on another human being. And I'd be willing to even extend the definition of "vegan" here to any person who makes the most effort possible to minimize harm, so as not to to bar some hypothetical race of intelligent "cat-people" who evolved from obligate carnivores from achieving similar levels of social harmony. What matters here is not the particular diet, but rather the intent and moral character that it reflects.

However, I still think a vegan world would be far from perfect, and we would have many of the same issues we face today. I believe we would still have an economy much like the one that operates today, consisting of several large corporations constantly vying against one another and seeking to consolidate power. I believe we would still have some level of corruption in healthcare and academia. We'd still probably have issues like climate change, homelessness, fat cat oligarchs, stark wealth income inequality, and phallic monuments to corporate greed like SF's Saleforce Tower (sorry, I just hate this one in particular). I say this because I believe that a lot of the issues that we face in the modern world arise not from any particular "evil", but rather a fundamental aspect of human nature that is in fact thought of as being quite the opposite -- love. That is, the love that we have for our friends and family, and in particular the love that parents have for their children.

When it comes to protecting people that are close to us, people are often willing to take more "aggressive" measures to ensure their well being. This is especially true when it comes to parents with their children. For obvious reasons, parents are highly motivated to ensure that their children remain safe and have a secure futures, and some are even willing to even go so far as to consciously harm/take advantage of others to better ensure this. Or, this may manifest in career choices, for example in choosing a more lucrative but unproductive job at a financial institution, so as to collect enough savings to send their child to college, rather than a less well-paid, but much more impactful research position. Again, these outcomes are not really the result of "evil" or "greed", but rather simply the instinctual love that parents have for their children that can sometimes cause people to act irrationally. When we look at big, useless corporations like Salesforce, for example, while there are certainly greedy scumbags who find their way to the highest executive levels, most of the employees consist of more or less "ordinary" people trying to support their families, or immigrants from other poorer countries who are trying to find security for themselves -- who, in turn, are certainly being exploited for their labor by natives who more than likely have children of their own and are simply looking out for them (as well as they know how to). I'm sure that people who are more morally conscious overall would be more careful about their irrational biases, and that we would therefore have a lot less of this in a vegan world, but I do not think that vegans would be completely perfect on this front either, as it is really just an unavoidable aspect of human nature.

My conclusion isn't an anti-natalist one, and I don't think people no longer having kids would solve all of our problems. And of course, if reducing suffering is important to us, people do need to reproduce (at least until we have reasonable certainty that AI will be able figure this out for us in our lifetime). There are of course many other sources of social problems that aren't necessarily tied to paternal bonds (at least on the surface level), but I think the collective human desire to find partners and have and raise children subtly influences a lot of how society works in ways that are sometimes hard to notice, and I think it's important to be aware of it, so it's something I wanted to talk about. So yeah, that's it, thanks for reading, let me know if you have any thoughts on all of this.

[Red]

I've been meaning to get to your other posts (I'll get to them at some point) but I have a minute to respond to this one.

People who go vegan now (for health and environmental reasons) in a world dominated by meat eaters I would think are overall less likely to engage in egregiously bad actions like rape, murder, etc. (of course everyone does bad things every now and again, no one's perfect), and are probably more conscientious on average too (donate more to charity, reduce energy consumption, are more politically active, among others). But in a world where Veganism is the norm, the baseline shifts; It's just what everyone does (like not owning slaves, or brushing your teeth). Whereas now Veganism is considered a virtuous thing to do (Despite being an abstention from harm, not necessarily a positive), once it's just considered common sense that eating meat is gravely immoral, being a Vegan won't make a person who is necessarily more ethical than others. Kind of like how a person who was raised Vegan today is probably not as virtuous as a person who goes Vegan (or even reducitarian) later in life; The person raised vegan has a huge advantage, and didn't need to go through the process of learning about why we should be vegan and how to go about doing it.

So yeah, ultimately, wouldn't expect a Vegan world in and of itself to reduce violence and immoral actions between human beings, especially as you said when family love is on the table.

Though even in a Vegan world I would NOT expect it to be a perfect utopia by any means, for a few reasons. Firstly, human irrationality will always be with us. What becomes the status quo action isn't always because people do it of their own volition. Everyone these days knows that chattel slavery is wrong, but you have people from 2025 be living in 1825, 90% of them would either own slaves or not make any real effort to buy products not made by slaves, and this complacency is mainly why the government had to do something about it. Even in the North, where slavery was outlawed, citizens in those states still bought slave made goods. People know that slavery is wrong, but they can't articulate WHY it's wrong. I would expect a similar issue in a Vegan world.

Our efforts to convince people to eat less meat and such are important of course, but Veganism will become mainstream when animal agriculture becomes too unsustainable and the technology gets to the point where Veganism is easy (so, not necessarily because of ethics).

Secondly, even though veganism would solve a ton of problems and reduce suffering, not all of the world's problems will be so interconnected. Disease, poverty, climate change, etc will still be with us even if people stopped eating animals, though I should say I would expect these issues to decline too, not because of veganism, but because of the gradual implementation of science and technology in solving problems. Hell, veganism is only a part of the solution to climate change (and not even the largest, though I am curious to see how much the deforestation factor amplifies it).

Similar to how violence has generally declined since WW2, war and other crimes by then will also have declined. It's sort of a correlation and causation thing. People in the future will be vegan not because they are necessarily more intelligent or rational, but because the zeitgeist will have shifted to a point where abusing animals for our gluttony is considered abhorrent, and science appreciation and social understanding will gradually affect mainstream ways of thinking. Like how racism and homophobia gradually withered away as civil rights movements gained ground. I kind of expect Veganism will be intitially viewed as something done out of necessity, then as time goes on and a few generations have passed by where people don't eat meat, the ethical realization will have a much easier time setting in and they will look back on us with disgust with how we treated animals (everyone of course thinks they'd be the exception and think they'd be Vegans if they lived in our time). We're all products of our time, even if we often go against the status quo.

I maintain that we won't really have any choice but TO go vegan, lest we doom ourselves to unsustainability in a world whose population is ever-increasing. Sort of like how industrialization in the 1800s was pretty much non-negotiable unless you were fine being economically undeveloped compared to other towns.

As to your point on people working evil jobs at evil corpoartions, yeah, most people aren't cartoon villains deliberately trying to screw people over, they're just trying to support their families, and they probably don't think what they're doing is a big deal. But evil corporations will probably have declined somewhat, particularly the tobacco, fossil fuel, and yes, the animal product industries. I don't know if most corporations are really all that evil, but I guess it depends on what it is. But uh, let's see what AI has to say about all this.

I of course always retain some level of optimism about things getting better, but I will always maintain a strong sense of cynicism when it comes to human nature.

[brimstoneSalad]

I think Red already got at this point.

I can imagine abolitionists and suffragists may have had a similar experience, having that feeling that everything would be better. I think it comes from the niche moral movement and the kind of moral prioritizing people that fill it -- sometimes activists are just really good people (the ones who join to do good rather than stir shit for its own sake anyway). A vegan world doesn't make the rest of the world shift to a more selfless or moral priority to align with activists, it just makes them stop eating animals. However, that would go a long way to improving the state of things and related harms.

We, of course, would lose any sense of vegan community because the rest of the world would be too, and we'd have to look for something else to occupy our time. Hopefully it's one of those good problems we some day have.

[aroneous]

People who go vegan now (for health and environmental reasons) in a world dominated by meat eaters I would think are overall less likely to engage in egregiously bad actions like rape, murder, etc. (of course everyone does bad things every now and again, no one's perfect), and are probably more conscientious on average too (donate more to charity, reduce energy consumption, are more politically active, among others). But in a world where Veganism is the norm, the baseline shifts; It's just what everyone does (like not owning slaves, or brushing your teeth). Whereas now Veganism is considered a virtuous thing to do (Despite being an abstention from harm, not necessarily a positive), once it's just considered common sense that eating meat is gravely immoral, being a Vegan won't make a person who is necessarily more ethical than others. Kind of like how a person who was raised Vegan today is probably not as virtuous as a person who goes Vegan (or even reducitarian) later in life; The person raised vegan has a huge advantage, and didn't need to go through the process of learning about why we should be vegan and how to go about doing it.

Yeah that's a pretty important point to make. When we imagine what a vegan world may look like, the first instinct is probably to extrapolate from vegans we know IRL or famous activists, all of whom had to make a significant effort (at least initially) to go vegan. Personally I don't even know anyone who was vegan from birth, and while they certainly exist, I have reasons believe it's also the case that vegans are somewhat less likely to have kids than the average population. And even the vegans from birth that do exist today are very likely to have parents that were not born vegan, and who have done so for ethical reasons, and their morals have likely rubbed off to some extent to their children. We just don't have many examples of people who are vegan, but absolutely shitty in most other ways, while we likely know plenty of people who aren't techically racist but are assholes otherwise, so a crappy world without racism isn't particularly difficult for us to imagine, relatively speaking.

Though even in a Vegan world I would NOT expect it to be a perfect utopia by any means, for a few reasons. Firstly, human irrationality will always be with us. What becomes the status quo action isn't always because people do it of their own volition. Everyone these days knows that chattel slavery is wrong, but you have people from 2025 be living in 1825, 90% of them would either own slaves or not make any real effort to buy products not made by slaves, and this complacency is mainly why the government had to do something about it. Even in the North, where slavery was outlawed, citizens in those states still bought slave made goods. People know that slavery is wrong, but they can't articulate WHY it's wrong. I would expect a similar issue in a Vegan world.

Part of what I was trying to get at was to imagine what the world would be like if people were vegan entirely of their own volition and strong ethical convictions, not simply because it is the most convenient option, to try and see what other negative aspects of society might find their way through regardless on account of the basic facts of human nature. That was mostly a thought experiment, and it is of course a much less realistic situation than the one that you're imagining. There's just so much variance in human developmental outcomes that we're likely to end up with a hefty number of pretty awful people regardless. But I do think that a shift in the moral baseline does still correlate pretty well with a positive shift in humanity's average ethical consciousness. The reasons for that shift are very relevant as well. If we all go vegan simply because we're forced to on account of climate change, I imagine the latter shift in ethics would be pretty small, compared to what it would be if we are somehow able to achieve a vegan world earlier, for instance by way of technological progress. Someone who begrudgingly goes vegan because they're forced to by the climate crisis is much more likely to go back to eating meat once transported back into the past than someone who goes vegan because we have technology that allows meat to be produced by non-animal means, since the latter person has more of an option to fully dissociate themselves from humanity's prior dark and backwards ways.

As to your point on people working evil jobs at evil corpoartions, yeah, most people aren't cartoon villains deliberately trying to screw people over, they're just trying to support their families, and they probably don't think what they're doing is a big deal. But evil corporations will probably have declined somewhat, particularly the tobacco, fossil fuel, and yes, the animal product industries. I don't know if most corporations are really all that evil, but I guess it depends on what it is. But uh, let's see what AI has to say about all this.

I think it depends heavily on the particular company. If there were some hypothetical "scum factor" that we could measure corporations by, I think companies like Salesforce would rank pretty low. While their products feed exclusively into the whole capitalist circlejerk, at least if you're a software engineer working for them you can give yourself some impression of having produced a useful tool for someone else. On the other hand, I suspect that companies like BlackRock would rank around the top of the list of overall evil companies with a majority of cartoonishly evil people working for them, since they exist solely to squeeze out as much money from the stock exchange as possible, and everyone working there knows that quite explicitly.

I've been meaning to get to your other posts (I'll get to them at some point) but I have a minute to respond to this one.

That's alright, no obligation to reply to anything of course unless it actually interests you (I certainly don't want it to be like I'm giving people "homework" to respond with each of my posts).

We, of course, would lose any sense of vegan community because the rest of the world would be too, and we'd have to look for something else to occupy our time. Hopefully it's one of those good problems we some day have.

I feel like we'd still be able to identify each other pretty well. We'd have general filters, like political alignments, that would probably pretty well capture what side of history someone would likely have been on in the past. And even without that, this is something that will likely be easy to pick up on about someone, just based on first impressions and having known them for only a few minutes. We wouldn't have a specific banner to identify ourselves under, but I think we'd still have a pretty strong sense of silent camaraderie.

[Red]

Part of what I was trying to get at was to imagine what the world would be like if people were vegan entirely of their own volition and strong ethical convictions, not simply because it is the most convenient option, to try and see what other negative aspects of society might find their way through regardless on account of the basic facts of human nature. That was mostly a thought experiment, and it is of course a much less realistic situation than the one that you're imagining. There's just so much variance in human developmental outcomes that we're likely to end up with a hefty number of pretty awful people regardless.

In that case, then we probably would be pretty close to a sort of Utopia... or maybe not. It depends on whether or not the people arrived to that conclusion through rational analysis or emotional reaction. If the former, then we'd be living in a world free of discrimination, ignorance, hatred, war, among other things, with efforts focused on advancing science and education, and eliminating problems. If the latter, it wouldn't be that much of a deviation from the status quo in terms of rationality, though you're dealing with a population that has more empathy and social awareness.

The thing is, TONS of people go vegan or vegetarian all the time. But most of them don't stay vegan.

But I do think that a shift in the moral baseline does still correlate pretty well with a positive shift in humanity's average ethical consciousness. The reasons for that shift are very relevant as well. If we all go vegan simply because we're forced to on account of climate change, I imagine the latter shift in ethics would be pretty small, compared to what it would be if we are somehow able to achieve a vegan world earlier, for instance by way of technological progress. Someone who begrudgingly goes vegan because they're forced to by the climate crisis is much more likely to go back to eating meat once transported back into the past than someone who goes vegan because we have technology that allows meat to be produced by non-animal means, since the latter person has more of an option to fully dissociate themselves from humanity's prior dark and backwards ways.

I think Vegan peoples of the future will probably be more ethically conscious, but I am skeptical that it would be because of some widespread change in character. People haven't changed, the world around them changed, and the world around them educates them on what is bad and what behavior is more ethical. During slavery, to the average ethically minded person, it was such a ubqiuitous issue that you may assume future generations would view ethics in light of and perhaps even within the context of slavery, but these days it's just a relic of the past that has little bearing on how we live our day to day lives. Same will be true of animal agriculture.

If it weren't for any environmental or sustainability issues, I think veganism would still win out, but it would take MUCH longer. Put it this way, if the only motives for abolishing slavery during the 1800s were ethical ones, it would not have been abolished for several more decades. It depends on what it is really. You needed other motivations for abolishing slavery and now animal agriculture becuase you're talking about overhauling an entire economic system and many people's way of life. But in regards to fighting racism and homophobia, ethical arguments are pretty much all you need (although there can be a case for economic and social arguments), since you literally have to do nothing but treat a person with basic respect.

I think it depends heavily on the particular company. If there were some hypothetical "scum factor" that we could measure corporations by, I think companies like Salesforce would rank pretty low. While their products feed exclusively into the whole capitalist circlejerk, at least if you're a software engineer working for them you can give yourself some impression of having produced a useful tool for someone else. On the other hand, I suspect that companies like BlackRock would rank around the top of the list of overall evil companies with a majority of cartoonishly evil people working for them, since they exist solely to squeeze out as much money from the stock exchange as possible, and everyone working there knows that quite explicitly.

Most big companies do pretty shady stuff, but working for the least evil one is still pretty useful, since they are important for our economy and day to day lives. I would say that as long as the product or service it provides is not harmful, working for such a company is neutral, perhaps a slight net positive.

I feel like we'd still be able to identify each other pretty well. We'd have general filters, like political alignments, that would probably pretty well capture what side of history someone would likely have been on in the past. And even without that, this is something that will likely be easy to pick up on about someone, just based on first impressions and having known them for only a few minutes. We wouldn't have a specific banner to identify ourselves under, but I think we'd still have a pretty strong sense of silent camaraderie.

I'm not sure if we would. Veganism is one of the few actions remaining that seperates the truly rational and ethical from the majority, so without that, with everyone being a vegan, it becomes much harder to find those who actually walk the ethical walk, and those who just talk shit.

Politics shift as well. Socially things shift to the left, where nowadays being a racist or homophobe is viewed as unacceptable (generally speaking) across the political spectrum, and becomes even more so as time goes on. Being an anti-racist or anti-homophobe these days doesn't mean that much. But seventy or so years ago? Said much more. But that doesn't mean they're automatically a rational person; There's such thing as being accidentally right. An example I like to give are Vietnam War protestors. Yes, they were correct in opposing the war, but were they opposing it because it was an actual moral atrocity being waged on fallacious reasoning, or because they did not feel as though it was fair they were going to be sent to fight in a war they didn't agree with?

The issue with identifying with someone via their political views is that most people just guess on their views, or unquestioningly accept the ones they were raised with. You can meet and agree with a left winged person, but they'll largely be advocating for things based on their guts and emotions, not from analyzing evidence. The real way of picking apart those ones is finding out who actually thinks through and evaluates their poltiical positions, and those who just intuitively take sides on issues. Of course, 95% of people fall into the latter camp.

[aroneous]

In that case, then we probably would be pretty close to a sort of Utopia... or maybe not. It depends on whether or not the people arrived to that conclusion through rational analysis or emotional reaction. If the former, then we'd be living in a world free of discrimination, ignorance, hatred, war, among other things, with efforts focused on advancing science and education, and eliminating problems. If the latter, it wouldn't be that much of a deviation from the status quo in terms of rationality, though you're dealing with a population that has more empathy and social awareness.

The thing is, TONS of people go vegan or vegetarian all the time. But most of them don't stay vegan.

I'd be very curious to know exactly what the split is here amongst the population of vegans, but of course the relative influences of someone's rational vs. emotional motivations for being vegan are probably pretty hard to measure, if that is even possible to do. My impression is that most vegans fall into the latter camp of being primarily driven by emotion, but that long-term vegans tend to have a much stronger rational component that motivates them to stay vegan after the initial shock of learning about animal agriculture. This kind of ties into my earlier thread on "non-vegan supremacy". Since most vegans present themselves as very empathetic and compassionate people, it may be easy to jump to the conclusion that they are people who are mostly ruled by their emotions, over their faculties of reason. So one may imagine a vegan world as a social utopia free of war, crime and other social problems, but in which vegans remain in a state of complacent squalor. However, I would say that the subset of vegans who are driven as much by reason as by emotion and empathy come much closer to defining a utopia in both social and technological terms.

I'm just not sure how perfect such a vegan utopia can really be, though, given some of the fundamental facts of human nature I've alluded to above, such as survival instincts and parental protective instincts, which may result in overcompensation on an individual level that collectively manifests in various aspects of society that we could clearly identify as "problems" that we would be better off without. But it could be a "utopia" under some definition of the word, in that we could have a society that is as close to perfect as it can be given the limitations imposed by our biologies.

Most big companies do pretty shady stuff, but working for the least evil one is still pretty useful, since they are important for our economy and day to day lives. I would say that as long as the product or service it provides is not harmful, working for such a company is neutral, perhaps a slight net positive.

I suppose there is a distinction here between work that is useful in helping us live our day-to-day lives versus work that fundamentally advances humanity and reduces suffering in the long term. Both are of course extremely important. We need people working in the agriculture, food service, healthcare and construction industries just as much as we need AI researchers. But I believe that in a social utopia, we'd have much less separation between the two when it comes to the roles that we delegate to individuals. W.r.t. work that is aimed at maintaining, rather than advancing humanity, obviously there's a certain set of skills that you need to have in order to perform well at it, but once you have these required skills, you have them for life. So by restricting a person into working a single blue-collar job for the rest of their lives, we squander a lot of human potential by not giving that person the opportunity to continue learning and possibly contribute to human progress. In a utopia we'd probably have more of a system where people are given the opportunity to cycle in and out of different lines of work throughout their lives, with some kind of accounting on a larger scale to make sure that all of our basic daily needs are still met.

The issue with identifying with someone via their political views is that most people just guess on their views, or unquestioningly accept the ones they were raised with. You can meet and agree with a left winged person, but they'll largely be advocating for things based on their guts and emotions, not from analyzing evidence. The real way of picking apart those ones is finding out who actually thinks through and evaluates their poltiical positions, and those who just intuitively take sides on issues. Of course, 95% of people fall into the latter camp.

It seems that politics is unfortunately a pretty poor estimator of moral character, even when it comes to people who have strong rational motivations for their political views. As much as I would like to be able to instantly relate to Democrats and liberals, these labels are defined more in terms of specific issues that a person is for or against, and doesn't really capture much about their reasons for their positions on these issues. For instance, is someone who identifies as a Democrat in support of foreign immigration because they believe in equal opportunity, or because they are a billionaire CEO who sees immigrants as a source of cheap labor?

[aroneous]

So one may imagine a vegan world as a social utopia free of war, crime and other social problems, but in which vegans remain in a state of complacent squalor. However, I would say that the subset of vegans who are driven as much by reason as by emotion and empathy come much closer to defining a utopia in both social and technological terms.

Something else I thought of recently to piggyback off of this point. Many technological advances that define the modern world were birthed from very negative social factors in the past, for instance, during World War II the Nazis created the first space-capable V2 rockets, and the United States developed the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC, for doing rapid ballistic calculations. We literally had to create hell for ourselves to give ourselves sufficient motivation to create these technologies which have had immense utilitarian benefits for humanity beyond their original intended purposes. So one very erroneous path of reasoning that people might go down is that in a vegan utopia free of self-imposed social problems like war, we would just never make an effort to make important scientific progress, I guess because we'll just be so complacent with the social paradise we have created for ourselves.

But in a vegan utopia populated by empathetic and rationally-oriented vegans, I believe that we would be able to find extreme motivation for improving things from our understanding of the suffering present in the natural state of the world. We would be much more in tune with the scale of wild animal suffering, and in regards to our own suffering, highly driven to cure diseases and find ways to slow/halt/reverse human aging. It's a real shame that shitty past events like war kind of "take the credit" for such important human advancements, simply because of the fact that the vast majority of people in the past weren't particularly rational or ethically minded enough to find any reason to develop them independently. It of course couldn't have realistically been any other way, but in a hypothetical universe where Jesus spread vegan ethics instead of religion, and converted the entire globe to veganism 2000 years ago, I believe that humanity would have developed the ENIAC several hundreds of years earlier.

[brimstoneSalad]

Plenty of great breakthroughs happen in peace time, it's just a question of pouring cash into that research. Maybe without huge military budgets we'd have the money to do so, since we can just develop it for public use rather than have to manufacture a bunch of weapons with it, and we'd only have to do it once as humanity and not have to do it in every single great power independently.

You're right, I think the peaceful = no technological progress is probably a bad argument. It's just that historically democratic government hasn't put that much into research unless it was an immediate existential matter. People want to keep their taxes rather than see them helping others.

[Red]

but in a hypothetical universe where Jesus spread vegan ethics instead of religion, and converted the entire globe to veganism 2000 years ago, I believe that humanity would have developed the ENIAC several hundreds of years earlier.

I'm not sure. Maybe it would have happened slightly faster, but the thing to keep in mind is that the reason why scientific and technological development was so slow until relatively recently is because for the vast majority of human history, 95% of people were subsistence farmers that contributed little to nothing economically. I'm not sure if a different religious perspective would have changed that much.

Lots of scientific developments were happening during the Middle Ages (much of it funded by the church), it was just insanely gradual and the methodology wasn't as rigorous (since again, very few people were doing it and there wasn't much economic stimulus pushing it along), but then again that was an era where so little was understood, merely observing something or asking a different question constituted as a significant contribution. The discoveries made by scientists in the Middle Ages, and of course in Asia and Africa, all culminated in what's now referred to as the Scientific Revolution (which in of itself is a controversial idea).

Just be wary of what the folks on r/badhistory refer to as "Chartism":
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/com ... egate_all/

[aroneous]

I'm not sure. Maybe it would have happened slightly faster, but the thing to keep in mind is that the reason why scientific and technological development was so slow until relatively recently is because for the vast majority of human history, 95% of people were subsistence farmers that contributed little to nothing economically. I'm not sure if a different religious perspective would have changed that much.

It wasn't specifically about erasing religion, more just picking a distinct point in time for the hypothetical mass conversion. There's another complex discussion to be had here about the possible effects of religion on human progress, however. While religion and morals often do go hand in hand, most religions also encode some notion of acceptance of suffering and death as inevitable and part of "God's will". Whereas the whole point of science is to try to push the needle on these issues. But it's certainly not simply the case that "religion screwed us and is responsible for human stagnation". I think religion is more just a reflection of the way that people in the past sought to understand the world and find personal meaning and solace in death, rather than some evil force that is singlehandedly responsible for setting us back several centuries. I guess most people just accepted things as they are, and found more meaning in performing work "in the service of God" and passing on a genetic/cultural legacy for themselves rather than in helping one another in more meaningful/fundamental ways.

Sure, the vast majority of people throughout history were employed/enslaved in daily back-breaking labor, with little time to rest and think about how to improve things for everyone. And we've had periods of natural disasters, wars, and famine where everyone was struggling to survive. But we've also had periods of peace and economic surplus that afforded people much more leisure time, and we have always had ruling classes who were granted some ability to direct society and their own personal efforts as they see fit. There have always been low-hanging fruit, technologically/scientifically speaking, that have remained unplucked for hundreds of years, and I believe the reason for that is that people weren't really particularly motivated by ethics. Things could have turned out much differently, I think, if we had adopted a strong moral framework for ourselves much earlier on.