On Balance, do Religions Serve more to Unite People or to Divide Them?

[Augustus]

I didn't misrepresent your position because you have been taking a rationalist position since the beginning. You only began claiming that yours was an intuitionist position after I linked you to John Haidt and you found a Wikipedia article on the foundation of the intuitionist theory...

You also wrote that "For me, conscience relies on axioms from which to reason, and these axioms are culturally dependent. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one." That's a rationalist position.

It's easy to get a misunderstanding on forums, but once someone makes an explicit clarification I've never quite understood the desire for people to assume they have a better understanding of another poster's thoughts than that person themself does.

Remember, the context of the discussion was not previously intuitive v rationalist morality, but universal v culturally dependent morality. To argue against your position that morality is governed by a universal conscience I wasn't arguing that conscience had no role whatsoever but that it is very clear morality a modern, Western humanistic morality isn't universal.

So you are saying "why didn't you mention this before that became the topic we were actually discussing?" Hopefully this clarifies sufficiently.

If you still insist I'm wrong about my own thoughts, search my name and rational/irrational and you'll find numerous posts stating my belief that humans are not very rational creatures. Could probably try some other words like heuristic or Kahneman too.

Before that you wrote that religion caused the abolition of slavery. The sacred texts of religion and their interpretations are products of reason. That's a rationalist position.

We have 2 modes of thinking systematic and heuristic (or system 1 and system 2 as Dan Kahneman described them). These affect all areas of thought. Your own article confirms that they affect morality too.

The anti-slavery movement fits the criteria for the activation of the systematic mode. If you look back to the Greeks, they had a fundamental belief in the inequality of humans (which reflects nature). Someone born and raised into such a society would not 'intuitively' know that slavery was a moral evil. If they did, we can assume at least one person would have written about it.

Human equality was a product of religious creation mythology and if intuition was later involved, it was due to the change on social norms among certain sectors of the population.

So, the products of moral reasoning like the interpretations of the Ten Commandments can be negative (conflict with conscience), or neutral (not conflict with conscience) but never positive (superior to conscience).

Why do you believe our conscience is perfectly moral (in the sense that you couldn't improve on it)?

Humans are complex, emotional creatures who have potential for benevolence and maliciousness, altruism and selfishness. We also seem to have a natural bias towards reciprocity in terms of transgressions against us. We judge guilt/innocence very subjectively and usually want the 'guilty' to face negative consequences.

What makes you supremely confident that no philosophical rule, principle or heuristic could lead to a more positive outcome than instinctive reaction?

I wouldn't know that from what you've written.

Because we weren't talking about it. As soon as we did, I made my position very clear.

The intuition of reasoned judgments?

Sorry typo, intuition OR reasoned judgement.

You don't seem to have a clear idea of the difference between intuition and reason.

Do you agree with the article that we use both intuitive and systematic judgements in morality?

No one knows how we develop intuition but it emerges from the unconscious mind. But we learn from conscious reasoning. People learn to react to threats through the reasoning function of the conscious mind. They don't intuitively change and "circle their wagons."

Again, your article disagree with you:

When people are asked to think about their own deaths, they appear to suppress a generalized fear of mortality by clinging more tightly to their cultural world view. Death-primed participants then shift their moral judgments to defend that world view. They mete out harsher punishment to violators of cultural values, and they give bigger rewards to people who behaved morally (Rosenblatt et al., 1989). Death-primed participants have more negative attitudes towards those who do not fully share their world view (e.g., Jews; Greenberg et al., 1990). From a terror management perspective, moral judgment is a special kind of judgment, since moral judgments always implicate the cultural world view.


So can we talk about the article you posted now? I've clarified my position so hopefully we can start from that point, I've got no real interest in continuing pointless and dull discussions about the reason for a misunderstanding.

So, why do you think the article is wrong when it says: "The model is a social model in that it de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals, emphasizing instead the importance of social and cultural influences."

 

[joe1776]

@Augustus

You say I don't understand your position. I'm sure of it. I'm also sure you don't understand mine because you keep referring to the Haidt paper I linked for you only because Jon Haidt was the first to offer research demonstrating that the judgments of conscience are intuition not reason. At that point, you had offered up two comments on conscience that seemed to put you squarely in that rationalist camp. I don't agree with Haidt on much of anything beyond the fact that moral judgments are intuitive.

I think if we were able to get say a 33 member unbiased jury in every culture in the world and give them the facts in two killings, one a cold-blooded murder and the other in a clear case of self-defense, the judgments would be the same in all cultures.

Now, here's the part that confuses you and Jon Haidt (but not the Harvard psychologists conducting the Moral Sense Test): Getting an unbiased jury in all cultures on any case isn't a simple matter.

If the killing in self-defense is a woman killing her husband, she won't get a fair trial in many countries. You and Jon Haidt reason that the culture is such cases has caused a different moral intuition. I see the attitude about women as a cultural bias that has sent justice off course. It's a cultural bias that will disappear when the conscience-driven moral advance of women's rights sweeps the entire world just as the conscience-driven abolition of legal slavery did.

 

[syo]

On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?


I think it depends on the religion. Some seem far more divisive than others, and others seem far more unifying.

there are a few religions that kill the infidels. christianity was one. I don't think it still is. later on christianity ex-communicated people. now, I think they keep a lower profile.

 

[metis]

On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?

I honestly don't know. I sorta see religion much like I do a car-- they can be used for either good or evil.

 

[robocop (actually)]

On balance, do you think religions serve more to unite people or to divide them?


I think it depends on the religion. Some seem far more divisive than others, and others seem far more unifying.

There's a Bible verse that goes "There are more for us than against us."