Status Updates From Mintea moralistă: de ce ne ...

“People bind together subjectively against external forces of evil… The dance draws everyone together. Whatever their relationship… they become a unit, singing, clapping, moving together in an extraordinary unison of stamping feet and clapping hands, swept along by the music. No words divide them; they act in concert for their spiritual and physical good and do something together that enlivens them…”

“In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson catalogues the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper. He shows how John Calvin developed a strict and demanding form of Christianity that suppressed free riding and facilitated trust and commerce in sixteenth-century Geneva. He shows how medieval Judaism created "cultural fortresses that kept outsiders out and insiders in."”

“If Durkheim is right that religions create cohesive groups that can function like organisms, then it supports Darwin's hypothesis: tribal morality can emerge by group selection. And if Darwin is right that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, then it supports Durkheim's hypothesis: we are Homo duplex, designed…to move back and forth between the lower…and higher…levels of existence.”

“In other words, 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…”

“Why doesn't sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: "To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity." But when secular organizations demand sacrifice…many refuse to do things that don't make logical sense. ”