Quotes About Community

the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: "In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not 'What's in it for me?' but rather 'What's in it for my group?

We humans have a dual nature - we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves.

I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

creating a temporary superorganism. Muscular bonding enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and then crush less cohesive groups.

human nature is 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us

We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. That ability is what I'm calling the hive switch.

Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

a Jew had to have two synagogues. One that he went to, one that he rejected. The Butcher's Theater

together." "Barone could have been

WITH ITS SOARING ceilings and oily oaken tables, the central branch of the Berkeley Public Library harks back to a grander, more civic-minded era. No other local building embodies more starkly the gulf between 1900s idealism and twenty-first-century reality.

Social norms are the cement that holds societies together.

He said, "Now all I have to do is find eight homeless people—'scuse me, unhomed individuals. You're the social scientist. Tell me why people think renaming anything makes a difference." "It's easier than finding a real solution.

We are who we are in relation to others.

All the lonely people.

chefs, the Guatemalans, sometimes

Just because others have it worse doesn't mean you have to suffer in silence.

Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...

One of the ways over the years that the church has severely weakened corporate prayer is that we let prayer be about the people there, rather than about God. We