Honest people finish dead last in the race that is life. The winners are people who know where to draw the line between honesty and God Damn Lies(tm).
I say that as another fellow honest person (or at least I like to think I am...).
It depends on what race you're running. The problem is letting the con artists define the race - for money, for power. If you are running for something else, the cons are the ones that are losing. For some reason, our society defers to the cons, especially these days.
The cons disparage honesty because it doesn't work in their race - how can you be an effective con if you act honestly? - and they don't understand how to operate it; they've accumulated skills and habits in manipulation, not honesty (which takes skill and experience to do effectively in real life situations).
At the end of the day we all end up in a pine box. And if I'd taken advantage of people for money, it'd probably keep me up at night feeling guilty. Heck I felt guilty accepting money back from people I'd loaned it to that needed it.
I like to think there's enough of 'us suckers' to keep society as a whole running functionally, and don't want to know if not :).
So yeah, we aren't suckers, and without us our civilization will collapse.
0: https://www.oipa.org/international/animals-sense-of-fairness
He's saying people with religious beliefs lean more towards maintaining an honest society.
Personally, I'm inclined to agree. I'm Japanese and one of our old sayings is that "The Sun is looking down on us.", which is to say the Sun sees everything we do so we shouldn't do anything we would be ashamed of.
>Even without belief in gods, birds will 'take note' when other birds receive food non-proportionately[0].
By what measure are you so decisively saying that birds don't believe in gods? I'm not aware of any means with which we can communicate with birds to such a detailed extent.
>That's not even mentioning how religion has been used in the past to tear societies apart as well as individuals.
Every single religion is fundamentally about uniting peoples together and maintaining the public peace. It is unfortunate that this gets warped and abused when two different religions meet and end up viciously disagreeing, but murdering each other has never been the primary point of religion.