Sublime

The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Members of more traditional communities tend to assign approximately equal importance to all three moral categories, which he calls “foundations.” But educated Westerners with progressive political views differ. They tend to assign great importance to the first foundation, fairness, and very limited

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarizes the dilemma in The Righteous Mind, when he writes, “We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.” It’s easy enough for most of us to spot the flaws in the fairies, because we have no

Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”

In his book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about how group communal brains work: If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others … you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the

But as the social sciences advanced in the twentieth century, their course was altered by two waves of moralism that turned nativism into a moral offense. The first was the horror among anthropologists and others at “social Darwinism”—the idea (raised but not endorsed by Darwin) that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals

Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

Mancur Olson argues that political participation in large groups is generally attributable to the presence of “selective incentives”—rewards and punishments that operate not indiscriminately on the community as a whole but, rather, selectively in favor of the participants.