6 ms·

Birth of the Moralizing Gods

47 points by reptation 11y ago

rntz 11y ago
full article link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full
TerryADavis 11y ago
God's world is perfectly just. We can imagine chat bots. God coudl answer prayers with artificial intelligence in his post singularity mind. No sweat. One chat bot dedicated to each person? No sweat. God does justice. He balances pleasures and pains. He balances laughter and crying. NOt a single person has great joy and not great sorrow. usually great joy and sorrow occur at the same week or month or year. Luke 6:20-26 6:20 And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. 6:21 Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. 6:22 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. 6:23 Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. 6:24 But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. 6:25 Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. 6:26 Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. 6:27 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 6:28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. 6:29 And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. 6:30 Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. 6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. Gad has a justice-bot that is like a chat bot and it does justice no matter what. Joseph in the old testament went to prison for 7 years, then ruled Egypt. The book of job. You can't have you pudding if you don't eat your meat. You must have suffering to have paradise.
jdmichal 11y ago
The minor point at the end regarding the definition of "moralizing" reminds me of The Physician and the Priest. http://www.jhuger.com/the-physician-and-the-priest http://www.jhuger.com/the-physician-and-the-priest Things which had a visible adverse effect on these early societies tended to be encoded in religion. Slingerland's interpretation of mucking with the river as a moral hazard as opposed to a random taboo is exactly the kind of things the Physician came to find.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Makes one wonder if one need to record not just the laws, but also the reasoning behind the laws. This to avoid having laws turn into the religious edicts, and also to allow future generations to examine of the reasoning still holds in their context.
mdturnerphys 11y ago
" . . . religions as dissimilar as Islam and Mormonism . . ." This seems like a strange pair to use as an example of dissimilarity. Islam and Mormonism have a number of commonalities that Mormonism doesn't share with other Christian faiths.
xlm1717 11y ago
"Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore." I wonder if this is why the rise of the Internet and the decline of religious affiliation are so closely related. "As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible." In today's society, we can shame anyone in the world we want in a matter of minutes using the power of social media. People themselves can enforce society's morals through shame. God may or may not be watching, but the Internet is always watching, and it never forgets. It's an interesting idea indeed. "They hope to show that the more omniscient and punitive the gods that people worship, the more money they are willing to give to strangers in their own religious community." I wonder if people would be more willing to give to strangers if they were told that their name, social media profile, and donation amount were being put on a website for the world to see (and judge).
- mQu 11y ago
  I wouldn't say that Internet always watching can have the same effect because it's just mob of peers (humans) and ultimately can be ignored or fooled. God by definition can't. That why the concept can be disciplinary and ubiquitous. God watches you over the Internet too. However the concept of god (or God) in technology has been touched by sci-fi many times. Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Serial Experiments Lain, GitS, Stanisław Lem's books and many more. If as the article stipulates humans need an external factor to be kept in line with social norms than this could be the evolution of religion.
  - xlm1717 11y ago
    They can certainly be fooled, even deliberately, but they can only be ignored at personal peril. For example, when a corporation does something someone doesn't like, or an employee (high-ranking or not) of that company does something that someone doesn't like, there are many instances where demands were made from a corporation (apologize for so-and-so, fire so-and-so for doing this) with the threat that the corporation would be boycotted if they didn't cooperate with the demands. Society is enforcing its morals via the internet shame mob through threatening a corporation's livelihood, which I would say has the same effect as God enforcing society's morals through eternal punishment. If you'd like specific examples of what I mentioned, simply google "internet shame mob". There are many, many examples.
orand 11y ago
Fascinating implications. The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage prosocial behavior. As the article says, "Watched people are nice people." With the rise of the global internet and the simultaneous decline of religious viewpoints, what is the new "big god" that is big enough to unify the world's prosocial behavior? Belief in an omniscient NSA??
- danharaj 11y ago
  The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage people to accept the ladder of hierarchy and domination it has created. The most "successful" cultures have also been the most violent, vicious, and hierarchical. Perhaps it's time to move beyond big gods, big leaders, big masters, and big individuals.
  - qzcx 11y ago
    There is a good reason why successful cultures have hierarchies. Specialization and structure improve efficiency and standard of living for everyone under it. Do you think companies could do without CEOs?
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Absolutely. Worked twice at companies that lost their CEOs for months. Things ticked along very nicely, thank you. There are many forms of governance, and the autocracy is only one form.
      - sliverstorm 11y ago
        To my knowledge the temporary absence of the CEO is absorbable in the short term because the CEO is primarily concerned with things like strategy & the future, not the immediate day-to-day operations. You can keep ticking for a long time without direction or strategy. All the parts will seem to be moving. But you won't be getting anywhere.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
rdtsc 11y ago
The reason a moralizing god is important and those religions win is darwinian in a way -- a moralizing god lets the priests or the leaders of the religion control people more efficiently. They can convince people that god is watching them if they are mean, naughty, have bad thoughts, even when the priests are not there. It is the total surveilance society before the surveilance society was a thing. That allows mobilization and control of larger groups of people. And although it sounds kind of mean and critical, it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc...
- danharaj 11y ago
  > it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc... Why do you think people need to ruled in order to display these behaviors? Why do you think ruling people makes them behave in this way? I mean, what I'm saying is, I think your points are commonly accepted wisdom, but I find them extremely contradicted by my experiences with other people. It sounds like a whole lot of propaganda from a machine that produces propaganda in order to perpetuate itself. > The reason a moralizing god is important and those religions win is darwinian in a way -- a moralizing god lets the priests or the leaders of the religion control people more efficiently. They can convince people that god is watching them if they are mean, naughty, have bad thoughts, even when the priests are not there. Are you saying that people aren't able to think about how their actions affect their peers materially and socially unless they buy into the idea of a magical faerie that always watches them? I find this article deeply unconvincing, to be honest.
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    > Why do you think people need to ruled in order to display these behaviors? They don't necessarily. But slowly over the ages groups that held those beliefs somehow proliferated more than those that din't. It could just be a fluke, a correlation with some other hidden variable. But maybe it was the cause and a light statistical advantage over a thousand+ years can make a large difference. > Are you saying that people aren't able to think about how their actions affect their peers materially and socially unless they buy into the idea of a magical faerie that always watches them? Thinking independently and rationally vs being 100% controlled is not how it work. There is something in between the two. When it comes to religion, it usually forms and ideological framework that gets instilled early on. At a young enough age it became part of background (the world view) such that even if the person is thinking they are thinking rationally, chances are they are still influenced by that ideology. > I find this article deeply unconvincing, to be honest. Well I am an amateur as well so don't take my words for anything. I just offered a perspective (that is probably obvously wrong in some way if an anthropologist/sociologist/historian would look at it).
joe_the_user 11y ago
Despite the rhetoric of using science, the enterprise described in the article seems too fuzzy and ill-defined to be able to support any strong conclusions. Generalizing the result of psychology to other fields is a dicey affair. Determining what a "big god" even is, is a matter of interpretation. And determining that a change in religious belief is a cause or an effect of a changed social structure is a difficult problem. And the researchers describing the enterprise give a strong impression of having an agenda (talking about things they noticed growing up, etc). Atheism is common in Western Europe yet the area doesn't seem to have much trouble engaging in large scale cooperation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe
riemannzeta 11y ago
I find it pleasing that their theory is consistent with Julian Jaynes's theory about the origin of consciousness. One could view this even as an extension of Jaynes's theory. First, we became conscious, then self-conscious. Consciousness was a prerequisite to any form of society. Self-consciousness was a prerequisite to a moralistic society. The details of the form of deity seem to me a proxy for the underlying question about how the brain was evolving over this period. Although the article notes that this fact is in dispute, at least to me it seems striking that there do not appear to have been any large-scale wholly atheistic or agnostic civilizations in history until recently. To continue the thought about the biological substrate for consciousness and self-consciousness, I wonder what that implies about whether or how are brains have evolved in the recent past? Is there some allele or set of alleles that express for pro-social tendencies that are required for pluralistic, capitalistic, atheistic/agnostic civilizations?
outofcuriosity 11y ago
Seems like a just-so story until the methodology of their quantitative analysis is publicly-available.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
There's been a lot of research proving that people who lie to themselves are more successful then those who are honest with themselves. In fact research indicates that lying to yourself is actually the norm; its' the people who are honest with themselves that are more likely to be clinically depressed. This is the first time I've seen this theory applied to civilization.
- riemannzeta 11y ago
  what do you mean by "more successful"?
  - pharrington 11y ago
    Probably something like better matching their societies' standard fitness functions e: what i probably meant to say was "more likely to pass on their memes"
  - crimsonalucard 11y ago
    in everything really. From business to passing on genes.
louithethrid 11y ago
My own private theory is that alcoholics developed agriculture first. Nothing makes you settle down, herding bees for mead and cultivate wheat- then a neverending desire for beer around the year. The irony is that even moralizing goods are in the end just ways for declaring some overspending behaviour holy and thus in the long run blood thirsty. Non-scientific societys loop allmost always into (civil)war - moralizing gods just allow for a higher piling up of social dynamite before the blow.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  Survival drives us harder then the taste of beer.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  "Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man." A. E. Housman
kafkaesque 11y ago
(This turned out to be a semi-rant.) I will play "devil's advocate". The first thing I thought about when the researchers explained this: Norenzayan thinks this connection between moralizing deities and “prosocial” behavior—curbing self-interest for the good of others—could help explain how religion evolved. In small-scale societies, prosocial behavior does not depend on religion. The Hadza, a group of African hunter-gatherers, do not believe in an afterlife, for example, and their gods of the sun and moon are indifferent to the paltry actions of people. Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore, Norenzayan says. The danger of a damaged reputation keeps people living up to the community's standards. [...] Norenzayan points out, however, that the complexity of most of the cultures analyzed is limited—they are small-scale chiefdoms, not large agricultural societies. was tribalism. This seems like they're trying to put a different spin on it. Before political systems were formed, this is how tribe members developed trust within their societies. This is on a low-scale population or society. The article continues with this: As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible. So there's nothing stopping you from taking advantage of the work and goodwill of others and giving nothing in return. Reneging on a payment or shirking a shared responsibility have no consequences if you'll never see the injured party again and state institutions like police forces haven't been invented yet. But if everyone did that, nascent large-scale societies would collapse. Economists call this paradox the free rider problem. How did the earliest large-scale societies overcome it? Isn't this exactly what happened? Or to what "large-scale societies" are they referring? I studied Latin American and Spanish history the most, so I'll stick to the best example I know of. In an infamous story of Spanish colonisation in modern day Cajamarca, Peru, and what would precipitate the Battle of Caxamarca and initiate a 2000-people massacre and the destruction of the Incan empire, Friar Vicente de Valverde y Alvarez de Toledo in a deceitfully kind manner asked Emperor Atahualpa to essentially convert to Catholicism. This was after Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro wanted a friendship pact that Atahualpa had already heard rumours was a trap. So, Atahualpa refused. Later Friar Vicente gives Atahualpa the Bible, which he knows indigenous peoples do not know what one is since they had not even discovered writing, much less books, at that time. Atahualpa naturally throws the book and this is taken to be an "attack" on the Spanish Empire. The Spanish armada guns down 2000 natives, erects a church at the Incan capital of Cuzco, and proselytises the entire kingdom. Don't read the garbage Wikipedia article on it. Instead read Spanish Friar Bartolme de las Casas' A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Then juntas were formed. The Spanish empire was spread thin. Dutch Revolt. The Napoleonic Wars? British West Indian labour unrest? These researchers should look up the word PROSELYTISM. They seem to have ignored the beginnings of the Christinisation of a large part of the world. It was tainted with killings, political deceit and motivation and to control societies, as was the case with Constantine The article says: In some societies, belief in a watchful, punishing god or gods could have been the key, Norenzayan believes. As he wrote in Big Gods, “Watched people are nice people.” Belief in karma—which Norenzayan calls “supernatural punishment in action”—could have had a similar psychological effect in the absence of actual gods, a proposition his colleagues are investigating in Asia. The researchers conflate obedience with some type of moral "niceness". For example, Japanese society has been constructed to publicly humiliate you if you step out of order. And humiliation and losing face is the worst social burden for them. There is no way to scientifically define what is "nice" without involving at least some type of philosophical underpinning; e.g., utilitarianism, consquentialism, deontologism. And even then, the only thing that may be proven is good ethics, not necessarily morality. The article: All you need, he argues, is a sufficiently affluent society in which people can afford to prioritize long-term goals (like the afterlife) over short-term needs. Studying Eurasian societies between 500 B.C.E. and 300 B.C.E., Baumard recently found that moralizing religions were much more likely to emerge in societies where people had access to more than 20,000 kilocalories in total energy resources each day, from food, fuel, and draft animals, for example. This is partly right. Add syncretism to the mix and you see that religion is far more than a "cognitive byproduct", but not because it helps our modern societies maintain order. Anthropologically, we understand that tribes and early civilisations used superstition, fables, and parables to explain morality and ethics. In my opinion, modern societies's idea of "right" and "wrong" is too complex to analyse as a whole. Advancements in philosophy, science, neuroscience, and a more connected world have probably all contributed to our idea of what is right or wrong. Some of these happened to be aligned with Christianity's or religion's view of what is right and wrong. Remember that the Bible was written by many men who philosophised about the nature of what is right and wrong and that the most advanced moral philosophy stops at the 18th century, with Immanuel Kant. After that it's just philosophy of science.
Animats 11y ago
That's an interesting thesis. There's a Western bias; Shinto has a large number of gods, rather than one big one. It's convenient that the "moralizing god" religions predate the concept of the corporation. The Christian Bible talks of kings and rich individuals, but has little to say about powerful organizations. If the Bible had more to say about moral organizational behavior, it would be a lot less popular with economic elites. (It's sad that the Greek and Roman religions are extinct. There should be some group trying to get the Pantheon in Rome back from the clutches of the Catholic Church.)
- vanattab 11y ago
  > (It's sad that the Greek and Roman religions are extinct. There should be some group trying to get the Pantheon in Rome back from the clutches of the Catholic Church.) This popular trend of bashing Catholics and their faith is really starting to grow tiresome. The "current" Pantheon was a Pagan Temple for ~483 years well over 1000 years ago. It has been a Catholic church for ~1406 years up until the present time. It's conversion to a church when Italy was converting from various forms of paganism is the only thing that saved it during the middle ages. It is located in a country where > %80 percent of the population describes themselves as Catholic(although far few say they are observant). I think you would have to have a very perverted sense of justice to think that it would be just to take ownership of the Pantheon away from that catholic church. Besides who would take control of it? The Italian government? If so, why make tax payers foot the bill for its preservation when the Catholic Church has been happy to do so for 1400 years and allows the public free access.
ucaetano 11y ago
I can almost imagine a high priest of ages past: "You must toil hard and suffer through your miserable life, because if you are a good person, after you're dead you'll experience the sublime eternity of the heavens". Then people start killing themselves to get to heaven faster. The high priest pauses, thinks and pronounces: "Oh, and whoever commits suicide goes straight to hell, no questions asked".
- colechristensen 11y ago
  There doesn't even have to be intent. Take 1000 different cultures with a random selection of moral values, unique to each. The moral values they hold dear, especially in early development, will have a very real effect on the survival of it's followers. Culture evolves right along with genetic code. The culture you're born into has very real effects to your survival fitness. Certain traits of religions survive better.
  - jxramos 11y ago
    I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween takes for granted why this religion exists at all and has perhaps survived many generations, maybe even millennia while those that no longer exist are out of sight out of mind. I can no longer buy the idea of cultures that cross generations with all their traditions being the result of some arbitrary thing open to whatever the fads and fashions of surrounding cultures they pass through. Survival of anything is not random. Hard to articulate these thoughts.
    - colechristensen 11y ago
      The word 'meme' was coined in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through the same processes of evolution. You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.

47 points by reptation 11y ago

rntz 11y ago

full article link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full

TerryADavis 11y ago

God's world is perfectly just. We can imagine chat bots. God coudl answer prayers with artificial intelligence in his post singularity mind. No sweat. One chat bot dedicated to each person? No sweat. God does justice. He balances pleasures and pains. He balances laughter and crying. NOt a single person has great joy and not great sorrow. usually great joy and sorrow occur at the same week or month or year. Luke 6:20-26 6:20 And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. 6:21 Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. 6:22 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. 6:23 Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets. 6:24 But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. 6:25 Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. 6:26 Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. 6:27 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 6:28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. 6:29 And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. 6:30 Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. 6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. Gad has a justice-bot that is like a chat bot and it does justice no matter what. Joseph in the old testament went to prison for 7 years, then ruled Egypt. The book of job. You can't have you pudding if you don't eat your meat. You must have suffering to have paradise.

jdmichal 11y ago

The minor point at the end regarding the definition of "moralizing" reminds me of The Physician and the Priest. http://www.jhuger.com/the-physician-and-the-priest http://www.jhuger.com/the-physician-and-the-priest Things which had a visible adverse effect on these early societies tended to be encoded in religion. Slingerland's interpretation of mucking with the river as a moral hazard as opposed to a random taboo is exactly the kind of things the Physician came to find.

digi_owl 11y ago
Makes one wonder if one need to record not just the laws, but also the reasoning behind the laws. This to avoid having laws turn into the religious edicts, and also to allow future generations to examine of the reasoning still holds in their context.

mdturnerphys 11y ago

" . . . religions as dissimilar as Islam and Mormonism . . ." This seems like a strange pair to use as an example of dissimilarity. Islam and Mormonism have a number of commonalities that Mormonism doesn't share with other Christian faiths.

xlm1717 11y ago

"Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore." I wonder if this is why the rise of the Internet and the decline of religious affiliation are so closely related. "As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible." In today's society, we can shame anyone in the world we want in a matter of minutes using the power of social media. People themselves can enforce society's morals through shame. God may or may not be watching, but the Internet is always watching, and it never forgets. It's an interesting idea indeed. "They hope to show that the more omniscient and punitive the gods that people worship, the more money they are willing to give to strangers in their own religious community." I wonder if people would be more willing to give to strangers if they were told that their name, social media profile, and donation amount were being put on a website for the world to see (and judge).

mQu 11y ago
I wouldn't say that Internet always watching can have the same effect because it's just mob of peers (humans) and ultimately can be ignored or fooled. God by definition can't. That why the concept can be disciplinary and ubiquitous. God watches you over the Internet too. However the concept of god (or God) in technology has been touched by sci-fi many times. Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Serial Experiments Lain, GitS, Stanisław Lem's books and many more. If as the article stipulates humans need an external factor to be kept in line with social norms than this could be the evolution of religion.
- xlm1717 11y ago
  They can certainly be fooled, even deliberately, but they can only be ignored at personal peril. For example, when a corporation does something someone doesn't like, or an employee (high-ranking or not) of that company does something that someone doesn't like, there are many instances where demands were made from a corporation (apologize for so-and-so, fire so-and-so for doing this) with the threat that the corporation would be boycotted if they didn't cooperate with the demands. Society is enforcing its morals via the internet shame mob through threatening a corporation's livelihood, which I would say has the same effect as God enforcing society's morals through eternal punishment. If you'd like specific examples of what I mentioned, simply google "internet shame mob". There are many, many examples.

orand 11y ago

Fascinating implications. The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage prosocial behavior. As the article says, "Watched people are nice people." With the rise of the global internet and the simultaneous decline of religious viewpoints, what is the new "big god" that is big enough to unify the world's prosocial behavior? Belief in an omniscient NSA??

danharaj 11y ago
The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage people to accept the ladder of hierarchy and domination it has created. The most "successful" cultures have also been the most violent, vicious, and hierarchical. Perhaps it's time to move beyond big gods, big leaders, big masters, and big individuals.
- qzcx 11y ago
  There is a good reason why successful cultures have hierarchies. Specialization and structure improve efficiency and standard of living for everyone under it. Do you think companies could do without CEOs?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Absolutely. Worked twice at companies that lost their CEOs for months. Things ticked along very nicely, thank you. There are many forms of governance, and the autocracy is only one form.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      To my knowledge the temporary absence of the CEO is absorbable in the short term because the CEO is primarily concerned with things like strategy & the future, not the immediate day-to-day operations. You can keep ticking for a long time without direction or strategy. All the parts will seem to be moving. But you won't be getting anywhere.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

rdtsc 11y ago

The reason a moralizing god is important and those religions win is darwinian in a way -- a moralizing god lets the priests or the leaders of the religion control people more efficiently. They can convince people that god is watching them if they are mean, naughty, have bad thoughts, even when the priests are not there. It is the total surveilance society before the surveilance society was a thing. That allows mobilization and control of larger groups of people. And although it sounds kind of mean and critical, it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc...

danharaj 11y ago
> it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc... Why do you think people need to ruled in order to display these behaviors? Why do you think ruling people makes them behave in this way? I mean, what I'm saying is, I think your points are commonly accepted wisdom, but I find them extremely contradicted by my experiences with other people. It sounds like a whole lot of propaganda from a machine that produces propaganda in order to perpetuate itself. > The reason a moralizing god is important and those religions win is darwinian in a way -- a moralizing god lets the priests or the leaders of the religion control people more efficiently. They can convince people that god is watching them if they are mean, naughty, have bad thoughts, even when the priests are not there. Are you saying that people aren't able to think about how their actions affect their peers materially and socially unless they buy into the idea of a magical faerie that always watches them? I find this article deeply unconvincing, to be honest.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  > Why do you think people need to ruled in order to display these behaviors? They don't necessarily. But slowly over the ages groups that held those beliefs somehow proliferated more than those that din't. It could just be a fluke, a correlation with some other hidden variable. But maybe it was the cause and a light statistical advantage over a thousand+ years can make a large difference. > Are you saying that people aren't able to think about how their actions affect their peers materially and socially unless they buy into the idea of a magical faerie that always watches them? Thinking independently and rationally vs being 100% controlled is not how it work. There is something in between the two. When it comes to religion, it usually forms and ideological framework that gets instilled early on. At a young enough age it became part of background (the world view) such that even if the person is thinking they are thinking rationally, chances are they are still influenced by that ideology. > I find this article deeply unconvincing, to be honest. Well I am an amateur as well so don't take my words for anything. I just offered a perspective (that is probably obvously wrong in some way if an anthropologist/sociologist/historian would look at it).

joe_the_user 11y ago

Despite the rhetoric of using science, the enterprise described in the article seems too fuzzy and ill-defined to be able to support any strong conclusions. Generalizing the result of psychology to other fields is a dicey affair. Determining what a "big god" even is, is a matter of interpretation. And determining that a change in religious belief is a cause or an effect of a changed social structure is a difficult problem. And the researchers describing the enterprise give a strong impression of having an agenda (talking about things they noticed growing up, etc). Atheism is common in Western Europe yet the area doesn't seem to have much trouble engaging in large scale cooperation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe

riemannzeta 11y ago

I find it pleasing that their theory is consistent with Julian Jaynes's theory about the origin of consciousness. One could view this even as an extension of Jaynes's theory. First, we became conscious, then self-conscious. Consciousness was a prerequisite to any form of society. Self-consciousness was a prerequisite to a moralistic society. The details of the form of deity seem to me a proxy for the underlying question about how the brain was evolving over this period. Although the article notes that this fact is in dispute, at least to me it seems striking that there do not appear to have been any large-scale wholly atheistic or agnostic civilizations in history until recently. To continue the thought about the biological substrate for consciousness and self-consciousness, I wonder what that implies about whether or how are brains have evolved in the recent past? Is there some allele or set of alleles that express for pro-social tendencies that are required for pluralistic, capitalistic, atheistic/agnostic civilizations?

outofcuriosity 11y ago

Seems like a just-so story until the methodology of their quantitative analysis is publicly-available.

crimsonalucard 11y ago

There's been a lot of research proving that people who lie to themselves are more successful then those who are honest with themselves. In fact research indicates that lying to yourself is actually the norm; its' the people who are honest with themselves that are more likely to be clinically depressed. This is the first time I've seen this theory applied to civilization.

riemannzeta 11y ago
what do you mean by "more successful"?
- pharrington 11y ago
  Probably something like better matching their societies' standard fitness functions e: what i probably meant to say was "more likely to pass on their memes"
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  in everything really. From business to passing on genes.

louithethrid 11y ago

My own private theory is that alcoholics developed agriculture first. Nothing makes you settle down, herding bees for mead and cultivate wheat- then a neverending desire for beer around the year. The irony is that even moralizing goods are in the end just ways for declaring some overspending behaviour holy and thus in the long run blood thirsty. Non-scientific societys loop allmost always into (civil)war - moralizing gods just allow for a higher piling up of social dynamite before the blow.

crimsonalucard 11y ago
Survival drives us harder then the taste of beer.
MaysonL 11y ago
"Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man." A. E. Housman

kafkaesque 11y ago

(This turned out to be a semi-rant.) I will play "devil's advocate". The first thing I thought about when the researchers explained this: Norenzayan thinks this connection between moralizing deities and “prosocial” behavior—curbing self-interest for the good of others—could help explain how religion evolved. In small-scale societies, prosocial behavior does not depend on religion. The Hadza, a group of African hunter-gatherers, do not believe in an afterlife, for example, and their gods of the sun and moon are indifferent to the paltry actions of people. Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore, Norenzayan says. The danger of a damaged reputation keeps people living up to the community's standards. [...] Norenzayan points out, however, that the complexity of most of the cultures analyzed is limited—they are small-scale chiefdoms, not large agricultural societies. was tribalism. This seems like they're trying to put a different spin on it. Before political systems were formed, this is how tribe members developed trust within their societies. This is on a low-scale population or society. The article continues with this: As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible. So there's nothing stopping you from taking advantage of the work and goodwill of others and giving nothing in return. Reneging on a payment or shirking a shared responsibility have no consequences if you'll never see the injured party again and state institutions like police forces haven't been invented yet. But if everyone did that, nascent large-scale societies would collapse. Economists call this paradox the free rider problem. How did the earliest large-scale societies overcome it? Isn't this exactly what happened? Or to what "large-scale societies" are they referring? I studied Latin American and Spanish history the most, so I'll stick to the best example I know of. In an infamous story of Spanish colonisation in modern day Cajamarca, Peru, and what would precipitate the Battle of Caxamarca and initiate a 2000-people massacre and the destruction of the Incan empire, Friar Vicente de Valverde y Alvarez de Toledo in a deceitfully kind manner asked Emperor Atahualpa to essentially convert to Catholicism. This was after Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro wanted a friendship pact that Atahualpa had already heard rumours was a trap. So, Atahualpa refused. Later Friar Vicente gives Atahualpa the Bible, which he knows indigenous peoples do not know what one is since they had not even discovered writing, much less books, at that time. Atahualpa naturally throws the book and this is taken to be an "attack" on the Spanish Empire. The Spanish armada guns down 2000 natives, erects a church at the Incan capital of Cuzco, and proselytises the entire kingdom. Don't read the garbage Wikipedia article on it. Instead read Spanish Friar Bartolme de las Casas' A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Then juntas were formed. The Spanish empire was spread thin. Dutch Revolt. The Napoleonic Wars? British West Indian labour unrest? These researchers should look up the word PROSELYTISM. They seem to have ignored the beginnings of the Christinisation of a large part of the world. It was tainted with killings, political deceit and motivation and to control societies, as was the case with Constantine The article says: In some societies, belief in a watchful, punishing god or gods could have been the key, Norenzayan believes. As he wrote in Big Gods, “Watched people are nice people.” Belief in karma—which Norenzayan calls “supernatural punishment in action”—could have had a similar psychological effect in the absence of actual gods, a proposition his colleagues are investigating in Asia. The researchers conflate obedience with some type of moral "niceness". For example, Japanese society has been constructed to publicly humiliate you if you step out of order. And humiliation and losing face is the worst social burden for them. There is no way to scientifically define what is "nice" without involving at least some type of philosophical underpinning; e.g., utilitarianism, consquentialism, deontologism. And even then, the only thing that may be proven is good ethics, not necessarily morality. The article: All you need, he argues, is a sufficiently affluent society in which people can afford to prioritize long-term goals (like the afterlife) over short-term needs. Studying Eurasian societies between 500 B.C.E. and 300 B.C.E., Baumard recently found that moralizing religions were much more likely to emerge in societies where people had access to more than 20,000 kilocalories in total energy resources each day, from food, fuel, and draft animals, for example. This is partly right. Add syncretism to the mix and you see that religion is far more than a "cognitive byproduct", but not because it helps our modern societies maintain order. Anthropologically, we understand that tribes and early civilisations used superstition, fables, and parables to explain morality and ethics. In my opinion, modern societies's idea of "right" and "wrong" is too complex to analyse as a whole. Advancements in philosophy, science, neuroscience, and a more connected world have probably all contributed to our idea of what is right or wrong. Some of these happened to be aligned with Christianity's or religion's view of what is right and wrong. Remember that the Bible was written by many men who philosophised about the nature of what is right and wrong and that the most advanced moral philosophy stops at the 18th century, with Immanuel Kant. After that it's just philosophy of science.

Animats 11y ago

That's an interesting thesis. There's a Western bias; Shinto has a large number of gods, rather than one big one. It's convenient that the "moralizing god" religions predate the concept of the corporation. The Christian Bible talks of kings and rich individuals, but has little to say about powerful organizations. If the Bible had more to say about moral organizational behavior, it would be a lot less popular with economic elites. (It's sad that the Greek and Roman religions are extinct. There should be some group trying to get the Pantheon in Rome back from the clutches of the Catholic Church.)

vanattab 11y ago
> (It's sad that the Greek and Roman religions are extinct. There should be some group trying to get the Pantheon in Rome back from the clutches of the Catholic Church.) This popular trend of bashing Catholics and their faith is really starting to grow tiresome. The "current" Pantheon was a Pagan Temple for ~483 years well over 1000 years ago. It has been a Catholic church for ~1406 years up until the present time. It's conversion to a church when Italy was converting from various forms of paganism is the only thing that saved it during the middle ages. It is located in a country where > %80 percent of the population describes themselves as Catholic(although far few say they are observant). I think you would have to have a very perverted sense of justice to think that it would be just to take ownership of the Pantheon away from that catholic church. Besides who would take control of it? The Italian government? If so, why make tax payers foot the bill for its preservation when the Catholic Church has been happy to do so for 1400 years and allows the public free access.

ucaetano 11y ago

I can almost imagine a high priest of ages past: "You must toil hard and suffer through your miserable life, because if you are a good person, after you're dead you'll experience the sublime eternity of the heavens". Then people start killing themselves to get to heaven faster. The high priest pauses, thinks and pronounces: "Oh, and whoever commits suicide goes straight to hell, no questions asked".

colechristensen 11y ago
There doesn't even have to be intent. Take 1000 different cultures with a random selection of moral values, unique to each. The moral values they hold dear, especially in early development, will have a very real effect on the survival of it's followers. Culture evolves right along with genetic code. The culture you're born into has very real effects to your survival fitness. Certain traits of religions survive better.
- jxramos 11y ago
  I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween takes for granted why this religion exists at all and has perhaps survived many generations, maybe even millennia while those that no longer exist are out of sight out of mind. I can no longer buy the idea of cultures that cross generations with all their traditions being the result of some arbitrary thing open to whatever the fads and fashions of surrounding cultures they pass through. Survival of anything is not random. Hard to articulate these thoughts.
  - colechristensen 11y ago
    The word 'meme' was coined in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through the same processes of evolution. You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.