What would be one think you would take away from the world today? Anything?

[RichardGv]

The world is designed so perfectly that almost everything is useful in a way -- and annoying in another, usually -- so I would prefer to take nothing, not even mosquitoes and flies, unless I wish to let frogs suffer from starvation. :)

I'd take away religion. Not because I don't believe in religion and think it's stupid, but because it's one of the biggest causes of war, along with war over oil and money.

Hmm, it's a quite disputatious thing. Even though one could list numerous problems religions leave, they did play a dominant role in keeping the order of the societies in the past, and still an important role nowadays. (Religions do enforce quite some now seemingly unreasonable orders, though gradually decaying away.) The fear of penalties afterlife and the pursue of happiness in the heaven was the primary power driving people to "morality" for the last thousands of years. Modern societies provide the concepts of morality and law as replacements, yet whether they are as effective as the faith gotten feed together with mothers' milk and the hammer of the god as we imagine -- the things we could imagine are typically far more horrifying than the ones that actually exist -- remain questionable. At least, the world could very well be a mess if we take all religions away, immediately.

Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac's glorious work, has some descriptions about what happened after the downfall of Christianity at the time. Not necessarily impersonal, but it shows at least a part of the facts:

Misers have no belief in a future life; the present is their all in all. This thought casts a terrible light upon our present epoch, in which, far more than at any former period, money sways the laws and politics and morals. Institutions, books, men, and dogmas, all conspire to undermine belief in a future life,—a belief upon which the social edifice has rested for eighteen hundred years. The grave, as a means of transition, is little feared in our day. The future, which once opened to us beyond the requiems, has now been imported into the present. To obtain per fas et nefas a terrestrial paradise of luxury and earthly enjoyment, to harden the heart and macerate the body for the sake of fleeting possessions, as the martyrs once suffered all things to reach eternal joys, this is now the universal thought—a thought written everywhere, even in the very laws which ask of the legislator, "What do you pay?" instead of asking him, "What do you think?" When this doctrine has passed down from the bourgeoisie to the populace, where will this country be?

It opens the door of vast environment destructions, too, and all sort of disastrous things, because the world is no longer the god's property, it became ours -- and are we really capable to handle this property? Honestly, I suppose not as well as the god (even a totally non-existing god) did a few hundred years ago.

And as for the wars, wars don't come purely because of religions (or, to say, very rarely they do). Almost all of them are driven by interests, I believe, in this way or another. Religions act as a coat, the god as a doll, solely.