Is religion functional as a source of a standard of value today?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In a search for an answer to this question, it is well to begin with a review of the history of values in human society and their relation to religion. In all primitive societies, the values by which the society lives and coheres are intimately connected with the religion of the society. This is true of modern primitive cultures and tribes studied by cultural anthropologists, as well as of ancient pre-Hellenic Rome, ancient China and India, Arabia and Africa, and early American Indian and Eskimo cultures. The religion of such cultures is animism and is characterized by a belief in a large number of spirits that are generally unnamed except by type or class. Values in such cultures evolve out of the relationships believed to govern the interaction of human life with this spirit world, and are designed to make that relationship as harmonious as possible.
With the development of human civilizations and the integration of many tribes and cultures into nations, the earlier religious animism often developed into a polytheism, with a pattern of well-defined and named gods and goddesses having distinct personalities, characters, biographies and powers. This was true of Egypt, Israel, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and Rome, but, curiously, not of China, the other great early civilization. Israel, ideally for a considerable period, and practically during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was a monolatry (worship of only one god among many) rather than a polytheism, and this was also true of Egypt for a short time under Akhnaton, In polytheistic societies, values derive only partially from religion. Other values governing such societies, indeed some of the most powerful, are derived from civil, governmental, and military sources unrelated to religious belief, as with the caste system in India, the civil requirements of city-states in Greece, and military service duties in Rome.