Biologically, humans are a social species. Infant humans take longer to make it to adulthood than any other mammal, and are completely dependent on their parents as well as other adults for at least 5 years. Humans have always been domesticated, because the ape-like species they evolved from was already domesticated. They are not unique in the animal kingdom for this. Wolves, hyenas, elephants, all primates, etc are already domesticated. Even the big cats have a kind of community; when an alpha meets another alpha, it is not always a fight to the death. We have zero evidence that apes or big cats worship gods, and I won't entertain the notion. So no, it was not religion that domesticated people. It wasn't ethics, neither, but a survival necessity. Also, our big brains make us want to be around others of our kind, for entertainment, but that's another story. Anyway, community has to exist before any code of common ethics, and both will probably exist before communication (not necessarily language). Communication is necessary for religion, unless you believe that religion was created by actual Gods who did not require that humans were able to communicate the concepts of the religion to one another. I won't entertain that notion either.
To directly answer the question above, yes, a common goal such as herding pigs or tending crops would be enough to convince people to behave ethically toward one another. You don't need to add an extra level such as fear of God or the Afterlife when something as simple as survival necessity, complicated as well by the enjoyment of another's company, is already there. But to answer your question indirectly, standards of behaviour were in place well before the pigs-and-crops phase.
Your question about how can societies in ONE COUNTRY be different from societies in ANOTHER COUNTRY is deliberately ignorant of my entire post. Yes, if we go back 2000 years, and visit Italy, the most powerful nation in the Western World, we can see a slave-owning, elitist, violent culture worshipping multiple gods and demanding that conquered nations revere its emperors themselves as gods. The conquer-and-plunder ethics of that society determined the religious practices of those people. Its style of religion was a product of its style of government. Meanwhile, something similarly feudal but in many ways different was going on in Japan, a place with which IT HAD NO CONTACT. Yes, societies form differently in different places, and as such they develop different religions. Your question asked about diverse peoples in different places separated by geography and not shariung a common language. The examples I cited in my post were of people all living in one place and speaking to one another all the time. So I fail to be convinced by your deliberate misreading of my post.
Getting back to my post, the religion of the old Roman Empire is gone. It has no place in our current society. The religion of those Japanese is still with us. more or less. You asked me to compare various world religions, presumably to show that people all over the world are different. Since that has nothing to do with what I am saying, I declined. Instead I visited websites created by North Americans and read what they had to say about their religions as they existed in North America. Those various and diverse religions as they exist in North America are ethically similar. Perhaps Confucianism is a horse of a different colour in China, but here it's ethically quite similar to the "Do as you would have done" ethics of all religions in North America. This, again, is because the religions have adapted to meet the cultural standards of North America.
Thought experiment: Imagine a group of people right now trying to establish a virgin-raping, human-sacrificing, monkey-brain-eating cult whose mandate was to burn public property that it believed was owned by its gods. How long do you think it would take for that religion to completely change North American culture so that we all thought that was the ethical standard? Or say, try to imagine a group trying to establish into law the right for grown men to fuck young boys, like they did back in the Classical period? When will society get off its high horse and respect the religious or philosophical freedoms of its diverse people? (Hint: never. Society will tolerate religion and philosophy so long as the religion or the philosophy conforms to its ethics. Hint2: the first example was just nonsense, so don't look for a real world equivalent.)
Honestly, Deucaon, and I hope this sounds like an ultimatum, if you don't agree with me, that's fine. But trying to frame it as though you don't understand me, deliberatley ignoring the points I have clearly made, is irksome. If you are sure that religion came first, then ethics, and then people began living in community, well there's nothing I can do about that. You're entirely wrong since communication is required for a common religion, so society naturally needed to come first, but I'm not going to say that again. If you're sure that you're right about this, please tell people elsewhere on the internet about it, and see what they have to say. You have no converts or fellow-thinkers here.
We all get it. I am not convinced that you don't believe in God, but who cares? You are certain, and there is to be no doubt, that it is belief in God that has been singularly responsible for creating order in human society instead of Chaos. Oddly enough, you also believe that it only by challenging order that human society has ever changed. So you think that ethics are responsible not only for allowing society to exist but also for challenging its growth.
You bring up honour and decency, and say that they are born from fear. I say nay nay. Honourable, decent guys are reliable, and as such they get hired for important jobs. The boldest warrior or largest bully in the world can only get so far on cracking skulls before a hundred snivelling weaklings make a trophy of his spine. Community, communication, and a desire for positive feedback from other living, breathing human beings makes people act decently toward one another. I doubt most people think of God on a regular basis. Your certainty that somewhere in the back of their minds is a fear that God will get them if they aren't nice to people, well that's your own religious bugaboo. I don't try to deny that religion has been with us a long time, but no way will I imagine that it's the source of decency. At best, again, I will say tat religion is a product of society, and in some societies religious groups have had the power of politicians. But no way is decency all about fear; the majority of it is the good feeling folks get when others praise them for their good work, or thank them for their help, or in many cases, actually reward them. You will find if you have pets or kids that positive feedback is better than negative feedback in training them. It's community and communication, a desire for immediate positive feedback, that makes folks behave as they do, not fear of punishment. That and the evolution of a survival necessity born from the fact that we are so utterly helpless in our infant years.
If you have something new to say on this Howard Roarke-styled, abandon-religion-forced-ethics -as-only-tool-for-social-progress, please do. I still don't see that course as anything more than an exception. As I view history, the majority of social change has come about through communication, acting in community, and group decisions. Resistance to change has occasionally been unethical, but the majority of the change itself has come about ethically. But I will concede at the very least that this is a potentially interesting discussion. The discussion of which came first, Religion or Ethics? is turning into a skipped record.
This was less of a debate and more of a lecture. Unfortunately it took a few days for me to provoke you into explaining your theory fully after it was clear that no one would talk unless I gave them something to work with but it has been worthwhile. I was sincere about trying to understand the origins of ethics and how ethics effect human endeavour so I gave you a theory full of holes. Thankyou for teaching.
And while you're at it, define "progress." I just see that societies change, but there's some old world idea that change is part of some path toward greater complexity or to some other positively-charged notion of superiority. This notion is at the heart of the popular understanding of evolutionary mechanics as well, and is a part of that big argument. Well, for that to be the case, then there needs to be an end goal of the change, and then you're bringing in a Master Plan, maybe an Intelligent Designer, all that jazz. All of that stuff is religious, and I don't believe in God, so it sounds unconvincing at best and possibly silly. As I see it, societies change, and they change their ethics and they change their religions. Often these changes come with changes in geography, with comfort and wealth, with industry and technology, etc. To say that religious forces mandated all of these changes requires a pretty strong argument. You could use the US Civil War in your argument, where Democracies on both sides sang hymns to the same God and yet so fundamentally disagreed on the subject of State Rights and Human Slavery that they divided families and murdered one another by the thousands. I'd be curious to see what you had to say about that.
I don't know what progress is. Explain to me what you think societal/ethical progress is.
"I felt insulted until I realized that the people trying to mock me were the same intellectual titans who claimed that people would be thrown out of skyscrapers and feudalism would be re-institutionalized if service cartels don't keep getting political favors and regulations are cut down to only a few thousand pages worth, that being able to take a walk in the park is worth driving your nation's economy into the ground, that sexual orientation is a choice that can be changed at a whim, that problems caused by having institutions can be solved by introducing more institutions or strengthening the existing ones that are causing the problems, and many more profound pearls of wisdom. I no longer feel insulted because I now feel grateful for being alive and witnessing such deep conclusions from my fellows."
-Jimmy McTavern, 1938.