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Originally Posted by charles brough
Yes, laughter and storytelling around the campfire fosters closeness feelings, but societies are hardly united by laughter. "Stores," however, are another matter!
Religious stories told and believed in common do provide a sense of community. ( Why atheism makes you mean - SciForums.com)
And, yes, group living now needs all that because we are not evolved to live in such large groups, in societies. We evolved in hunting-gathering groups of only perhaps 40 or more individuals through millions of years of evolution. It is basic to our social nature. We are stressed up by being massed together and divided by a multitude of different beliefs---especially when they are all old and obsolete, unscientific.
we can do better with a new ideology, one that can unite the world . . . |
There seems to be a more recent study by Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff(2008 oct)[these same guys published the research in the thread linked above] that shows that secular institutional authorities motivate people to be charitable as much as the possibility of God watching does.
It is also interesting to note that religious people behaved more nicely only when they believed others(or God) were watching, and that the charitable act would improve their reputation.
Massimo Pigliucci had some good coverage over at
Rationally Speaking:
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To begin with, they debunk the oft-repeated claim that religiosity increases charitability. It turns out studies that have made that link are entirely based on self-reporting, a notoriously unreliable source of behavioral evidence. When one looks into experimental studies of the issue, the picture changes dramatically. A series of “Good Samaritan” studies found that people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) charitable behavior shows no correspondence whatsoever with the degree of religious belief. Secular people are just as likely (or not) to help someone in distress as are religious people. Interestingly, however, researchers have been able to show that a strong link between religiosity and prosocial behavior does emerge, but only when there is a self-reputation enhancing egoistic motivation: religious people are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior if they know that there is a good chance that their reputation in the group will be positively affected.
Perhaps one of the most interesting sets of experiments reported by Norenzayan and Shariff concerns what happens when people are reminded of a morally watchful authority -- religious or secular. In a control group that was not “primed” with a god-like concept, people behaved selfishly (most pocketed an available sum of money without sharing). When participants were primed with a god reminder, however, the modal behavior switched to fairness (they split the money). So, does religion trigger altruistic behavior after all? Nope. Here’s the kicker: people that were primed with reminders of a secular moral authority were just as altruistic as the religiously primed ones! It isn’t religion, it is the presence of a moral authority that does the trick.
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