>> By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficul

>> By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult. I'm an agnostic whose beliefs wrt good and evil correspond much more closely to those of many of my Catholic or Jewish neighbors than those of my extended family who are Baptists or Evangelicals or whatever the hell it is they're doing. I doubt this is unusual at all.