Quotes About Religion

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it.

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

You've got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.11 Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity

Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.

Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by the members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group. Group-level adaptations, as Williams noted, imply a selection process operating at the group level.

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.

Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon ... none of these things correlated with generosity. 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.

los grupos crean seres sobrenaturales no para explicar el universo, sino para poner orden en sus sociedades.

Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups.

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred.

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson catalogues the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper.

Whatever its origins, it's a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson's account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

Putnam and Campbell put their findings bluntly: By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.60

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."61

Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.

the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.

The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. But at the same time, it offers a valuable perspective from which we can understand and critique some of the ugly parts of secular societies.

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.35 As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.

The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly.

figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he

The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom has shown that our minds were designed for dualism—we think that minds and bodies are different but equally real sorts of things—and so we readily believe that we have immortal souls housed in our temporary bodies.