Religion Divides Us Quotes

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

Let’s de-bunk some of this, shall we? Myth 1– Kings and Queens are divine beings – rubbish. Kings and queens of old were murdering bastards who ruled with a rod of iron. Myth 2 – the rich prosper out of godliness – more rubbish. They gained their wealth by royal patronage and taxing and stealing from the masses. Myth 3 - the poor are poor because they’re depraved – yet more rubbish. They’re poor because of their naivety and childlike belief in, oh yes, Kings and Queens, the Church and the order of things. Finally, Myth 4 - women are evil and deliberately seductive – the biggest nonsense of all. Women are sexually attractive to men because they are the opposite sex to men; it’s not hard to see, is it? It’s the same for every species on the planet, you can see it in any mating ritual on the Discovery channel but this truth has been reversed and buried under the eternal lie fostered upon us by the church. That’s what the bible has achieved and that’s why our society is divided and divided again. That’s why we are never working as one, because religion was designed to divide and rule the masses,” she broke off and looked deliberately round the room, “but the big question is, for what purpose and by whom?

The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe. In the end, Religion will kill us all.

Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feelings save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.

Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.

The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment

The story Grandpa told us helped me realize that people cannot be divided into groups by ethnicity, religion, or any other feature, only into groups of good, bad, and indifferent people.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Let our religions unite us for human kindness rather than dividing us on what we believe. Eid Mubarak

Is that what God does? He helps? Tell me, why didn't God help my innocent friend who died for no reason while the guilty ran free? Okay. Fine. Forget the one offs. How about the countless wars declared in his name? Okay. Fine. Let's skip the random, meaningless murder for a second, shall we? How about the racist, sexist, phobia soup we've all been drowning in because of him? And I'm not just talking about Jesus. I'm talking about all organized religion. Exclusive groups created to manage control. A dealer getting people hooked on the drug of hope. His followers, nothing but addicts who want their hit of bullshit to keep their dopamine of ignorance. Addicts. Afraid to believe the truth. That there's no order. There's no power. That all religions are just metastasizing mind worms, meant to divide us so it's easier to rule us by the charlatans that wanna run us. All we are to them are paying fanboys of their poorly-written sci-fi franchise. If I don't listen to my imaginary friend, why the fuck should I listen to yours? People think their worship's some key to happiness. That's just how he owns you. Even I'm not crazy enough to believe that distortion of reality. So fuck God. He's not a good enough scapegoat for me.

Beliefs divide us, values unite us." from Godless – Living a Valuable Life beyond Beliefs

let’s imagine that 95 percent of the food on Earth magically disappears tonight, guaranteeing that almost all of us will starve to death within two months. Law and order collapse. Chaos and mayhem ensue. Who among us will still be alive a year from now? Will it be the biggest, strongest, and most violent individuals in each town? Or will it be the people who manage to work together in groups to monopolize, hide, and share the remaining food supplies among themselves?

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy. I am opaque, so much black asphalt. But at the same second, the second I know I've lost it, I also realize that the puppy is still squirming on his back under my hand. Nothing has changed for him. He draws his legs down to stretch the skin taut so he feels every fingertip's stroke along his furred and arching side, his flank, his flung-back throat. I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. I get in the car and drive home.

God would prefer us all to be united than divided. The devil would prefer us all to be divided than united. God prefers the man who loves than the one who hates. The devil prefers the man who hates than the one who loves.

Truth changes with the season of our emotions. It is the shadow that moves with the phases of our inner sun. When the nights falls, only our perception can guess where it hides in the dark. Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is--- the design God has created, in our own unique story. This is as varying as the constellations, and as turning as the tide. It is not one truth we live to, but many. If we ever hope to determine if there is such a thing as truth, apart from cultural and personal preferences, we must acknowledge that we are then aiming to discover something greater than ourselves, something that transcends culture and individual inclinations. Some say that we must look beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves. However, we don’t need to look farther than what is already in each other. If there was any great plan from a higher power it is a simplistic, repetitious theme found in all religions; the basic core importance to unity comes from shared theological and humanistic virtues. Beyond the synagogue, mosques, temples, churches, missionary work, church positions and religious rituals comes a simple “message of truth” found in all of us, that binds theology---holistic virtues combined with purpose is the foundation of spiritual evolution. The diversity among us all is not divided truth, but the opportunity for unity through these shared values. Truth is the framework and roadmap of positive virtues. It unifies diversity when we choose to see it and use it. It is simple message often lost among the rituals, cultural traditions and socializing that goes on behind the chapel doors of any religion or spiritual theology. As we fight among ourselves about what religion, culture or race is right, we often lose site of the simple message any great orator has whispered through time----a simplistic story explaining the importance of virtues, which magically reemphasizes the importance of loving one another through service.

Americans should never forget that the founders of this country, like all who have served her in uniform, were willing to die defending everything its flag represents. It's so easy to get lost in the controversies that divide us. But I believe, no matter what our race, religion, or beliefs may be, that Americans should be able to come together to keep our country rooted in what made it great: a land of opportunity, a place where people can make something of themselves, limited only by their imaginations and willingness to work hard; a country where we can all come together, whatever our differences, for the greater good; a country of hands up, not handouts, where we try to live by the meaning of the words "Love thy neighbor," and put as much effort into helping others as we do helping ourselves. By doing those things, we can continue to live up to the idea of "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. And there are so many things which unite people. It doesn’t matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it’s still the same pain. Feelings are what link people together, because the word ‘love’ has the same meaning for everybody. Or ‘fear’, or ‘suffering’. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That’s why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.

For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into half halves - to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a weekday. Do you think he cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer - and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in His ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the 'dim religious light' of some solemn cathedral?

Jesus does not divide the world into the moral “good guys” and the immoral “bad guys.” He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast. This means that Jesus’s message, which is “the gospel,” is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles—it is something else altogether.

If you are not one with us you divide the church. If you ever choose to miss another meeting you needn't come again.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

On some days I think it would be better if there were no religions. All religions and all scriptures conceal the potential for violence. That is why we need secular ethics beyond all religions. It is more important for schools to have classes on ethics than religion. Why? Because it’s more important for humanity’s survival to be aware of our commonalities than to constantly emphasize what divides us.

We're not very different from one another, not different at all, in fact. We're all just people with the same needs, the same desires, the same feelings. It's a lie about us being different. It's something they cooked up so we'd be fighting one another instead of them, the ones who keep us down and make their fortunes off our labor, the same ones who send us off to war when they get to fighting among themselves over the spoils. You'll find that out someday. They'll be calling on you to go to war for them, you can be sure of that, because there's going to be lots more wars in the future. I got in one myself, as you know. I saw men getting killed and wounded and crippled, and I must have killed a lot of men myself, and I'm just sick every time I think of it. Why? Because we were fighting one another instead of those who'd sent us out there. Oh, they're clever, those capitalists. It's hard to beat them at their game. They've fooled us with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they've got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he's better than the other. But it'll all change, 'arry. Believe me, it will. People get smarter. The human brain has a potential for development. Someday it will grow big enough so that everybody will see and understand the truth, and then we won't act like a bunch of sheep, and then that wall that separates the two sides of our street will crumble.

Yes indeed, both Muslim and Jewish!I, her father, am Muslim, at least on paper; her mother is Jewish, at least in theory. With us, religion is transmitted through the father; among Jews, through the mother. Therefore, according to the Muslims, Nadia was Muslim; according to the Jews, she was Jewish. She herself might have chosen one or the other, or neither, she chose to be both at once...Yes, both at once and more. She was proud of all the bloodlines that had converged in her, roads of conquest or exile from central Asia, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Arab, Bessarabia, Armenia, Bavaria...She refused to divide out her blood, her soul.

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... "These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature." ... Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today: "These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died." Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of communion.

Every action taken by human beings is based in love or fear, not simply those dealing with relationships. Decisions affecting business, industry, politics, religion, the education of your young, the social agenda of your nations, the economic goals of your society, choices involving war, peace, attack, defense, aggression, submission; determinations to covet or give away, to save or to share, to unite or to divide—every single free choice you ever undertake arises out of one of the only two possible thoughts there are: a thought of love or a thought of fear. Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals. Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends. Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select.

For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs?

I want very badly to challenge the ease with which we succumb to the false divide of labels, that moment in which our empathy gives out and we refuse to respond openhandedly or even curiously to see people with whom we differ. As I see it, to refuse the possibility of finding another person interesting, complex and as complicated as oneself is a form of violence. At bottom, this is a refusal of nuance, and I wish to posit that nuance is sacred. To call it sacred is to value it so highly that we find it fitting to somehow set it apart as something to which we're forever committed. Nuance refuses to envision others degradingly, denying them the content of their own experience, and talks us down tenderly from the false ledges we've put ourselves on. When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations. This opens us up to the possibility of at least occasionally finding one another beautiful, the possibility of communion. [...] It could be that there's no communion without [nuance].

We are not so different then."... "I never understood the war between our religions, or the war with Christianity. If there is one thing I learned from the time young Rose spent with us, it is that we are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.

There was another, much clearer survival of freethinking ways. Sisterdale had never had a church, and Joe said his family had rarely spoken of religion except to dismiss it. "Dad would tell us, 'Dat's for Catholics', or 'Dat's for Lutherans, not us,' and said that if he wanted to talk to God he could do it in the fields.

It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.

In America, racism is our oldest curse. But there are other divides—over religion, immigration, sexual identity. Sometimes the “them” strategy is just a narcotic to feed the beast in all of us.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.36

Lord Charles Canning, the last Governor-General and first viceroy of India (the transition from East India Company rule to the British Crown took place during his turbulent tenure, 1856–62) wrote candidly to Vernon Smith, president of the Board of Control, on 21 November 1857, at the height of the ‘mutiny’: ‘As we must rule 150 million of people by a handful [of] Englishmen, let us do it in a manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives’.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. As

We need a new, global spirituality—an organic spirituality that belongs innately to all of us, as the children of earth. A genuine spirituality that utterly refutes the moralistic, manipulative patriarchal systems, the mechanistic religions that seek to divide us—that control and oppress us by successfully dividing us. We need a spirituality that acknowledges our earthly roots as evolutionary and sexual beings, just as we need an ontology that acknowledges earth as a conscious and spiritual being. We need this organic, global spirituality because we are ready to evolve as a globally conscious species. We are at the point where we must evolve or die.

I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteemed the essentials of every religion; and, being to be found in all the religions we had in our country, I respected them all, though with different degrees of respect, as I found them more or less mixed with other articles, which, without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, served principally to divide us, and make us unfriendly to one another.

If societies are going to elevate women to equality with men—and declare that people of any race or religion have the same rights as anyone else—then we have to have men and women and every racial and religious group together writing the code. … Diversity is the best way to defend equality. If people from diverse groups are not making those decisions, the burdens and benefits of society will be divided unequally and unfairly—with the people writing the rules ensuring themselves a greater share of the benefits and a lesser share of the burdens of any society. … That’s why we have to include everyone in the decisions that shape our cultures, because even the best of us are blinded by our own interests. If you care about equality, you have to embrace diversity—

I never understood the discord between our religions. If there is one thing I learned from the time young Rose spent with us, it is that we are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that separates us.

In all conflicts between groups, there are three elements. One: the certitude that our group is morally superior, possibly even chosen by God. All others should follow our example or be at our service. In order to bring peace to the world, we have to impose our set of beliefs upon others, through manipulation, force, and fear, if necessary. Two: a refusal or incapacity to see or admit to any possible errors or faults in our group. The undeniable nature of our own goodness makes us think we are infallible; there can be no wrong in us. Three: a refusal to believe that any other group possesses truth or can contribute anything of value. At best, others may be regarded as ignorant, unenlightened, and possessing only half—truths; at worst, they are seen as destructive, dangerous, and possessed by evil spirits: they need to be overpowered for the good of humanity. Society and cultures are, then, divided into the “good” and the “bad”; the good attributing to themselves the mission to save, to heal, to bring peace to a wicked world, according to their own terms and under their controlling power. Such is the story of all civilizations through the ages as they spread over the earth by invading and colonizing. Differences must be suppressed; “savages” must be civilized. We must prove by all possible means that our culture, our power, our knowledge, and our technology are the best, that our gods are the only gods! This is not just the story of civilizations but also of all wars of religion, inquisitions, censorships, dictatorships; all things, in short, that are ideologies. An ideology is a set of ideas translated into a set of values. Because they are held to be absolutely true, these ideas and values need to be imposed on others if they are not readily accepted. A political system, a school of psychology, and a philosophy of economics can all be ideologies. Even a place of work can be an ideology. Religious sub—groups, sects, are based upon ideological principles. Religions themselves can become ideologies. And ideologues, by their nature, are not open to new ideas or even to debate; they refuse to accept or listen to anyone else’s reality. They refuse to admit any possibility of error or even criticism of their system; they are closed up in their set of ideas, theories, and values. We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self—image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favoured ones of God.

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. It takes many subtle forms; and in its self-righteous aspect, it is very obstinate. The desire to "serve" with the unconscious longing to dominate is difficult to understand. Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those whom we seek to control? To dominate is to use another for self-gratification, and where there is the use of another there is no love. When there is love there is consideration, not only for the children but for every human being. Unless we are deeply touched by the problem, we will never find the right way of education. Mere technical training inevitably makes for ruthlessness, and to educate our children we must be sensitive to the whole movement of life. What we think, what we do, what we say matters infinitely, because it creates the environment, and the environment either helps or hinders the child. Obviously, then, those of us who are deeply interested in this problem will have to begin to understand ourselves and thereby help to transform society; we will make it our direct responsability to bring about a new approach to education. If we love our children, will we not find a way of putting an end to war? But if we are merely using the word "love" without substance, then the whole complex problem of human misery will remain. The way out of this problem lies through ourselves. We must begin to understand our relationship with our fellow men, with nature, with ideas and with things, for without that understanding there is no hope, there is no way out of conflict and suffering. The bringing up of a child requires intelligent observation and care. Experts and their knowledge can never replace the parents' love, but most parents corrupt that love by their own fears and ambitions, which condition and distort the outlook of the child. So few of us are concerned with love, but we are vastly taken up with the appearance of love. The present educational and social structure does not help the individual towards freedom and integration; and if the parents are at all in earnest and desire that the child shall grow to his fullest integral capacity, they must begin to alter the influence of the home and set about creating schools with the right kind of educators. The influence of the home and that of the school must not be in any way contradictory, so both parents and teachers must re-educate themselves. The contradiction which so often exists between the private life of the individual and his life as a member of the group creates an endless battle within himself and in his relationships. This conflict is encouraged and sustained through the wrong kind of education, and both governments and organized religions add to the confusion by their contradictory doctrines. The child is divided within himself from the very start, which results in personal and social disasters.

I never understood the war between our religions, or the war with Christianity. If there is one thing I learned from the time young Rose spent with us, it is that we are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.

In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert Putnam and David Campbell illustrate the political implications of the rise of the Nones. They found that 50 percent of those who say grace before meals identify themselves as Republican, 40 percent as Democrats, and 10 percent as independents. No surprise there. It’s common for the media to speak of religious conservatives as the base of the Republican Party. What’s striking, however, is the intense partisan loyalty of those who never say grace—70 percent of them identify as Democrats and only 20 percent as Republicans. A

Humans have divided themselves in all possible ways. Country, religion, caste, color, wealth, language, profession, intellect, the list is endless. There are divisions within divisions and the reasons for all these divisions are the same - perceptions. If perceptions can divide, what can unite us?

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We

If you see one hundred insects working together toward a common goal, it’s a sure bet they’re siblings. But when you see one hundred people working on a construction site or marching off to war, you’d be astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large family. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability. We’re really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own. Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability, defines accountability as the “explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions to others,” coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves.8 When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.

From birth to death and further on As we were born and introduced into this world, We had a gift hard to express by word And somewhere in our continuous road, It kind of lost it sense and turned. There was that time we sure remember, When everything was now and 'till forever Children with no worries and no regrets, The only goal was making a few friends. But later on everything has changed, By minds that had it all arranged To bring the people into stress, Into creating their own mess. We have been slaved by our own mind, Turned into something out of our kind Slowly faded away from the present time, Forced to believe in lies, in fights and crime. They made it clearly a fight of the ego, A never ending war that won't just go They made it a competitive game, To seek selfish materialistic fame. They turned us one against eachother, Man against man, brother against brother Dividing us by religion and skin color, Making us fight to death over a dollar. Making us lose ourselves in sadly thoughts, Wasting our days by living in the past Depressed and haunted by the memories, And yet still hoping to fly in our dreams. Some of us tried learning how to dance, Step after step, giving our soul a new chance Some of us left our ego vanish into sounds, Thus being aware of our natural bounce. Some tried expressing in their rhymes, The voice of a generation which never dies They reached eternity through poetry Leaving the teachings that shall fulfill the prophecy Others have found their way through spirituality, Becoming conscious of the human duality Seeking the spiritual enlightenment, Of escaping an ego-oriented fighting Science, philosophy, religion, Try to explain the human origin. Maybe changes are yet to come, And it shall be better for some Death's for the spirit not an end, But a relieving of the embodiment So I believe that furthermore, We'll understand the power of our soul But leaving behind all we know, And all that we might not yet know It all resumes to that certain truth, That we all seek to once conclude.

In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls. Creating a nation of multiple competing groups and parties was, in fact, seen by America’s founding fathers as a way of preventing tyranny.60 More recently, research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”61

In their book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell analyzed a variety of data sources to describe how religious and nonreligious Americans differ. Common sense would tell you that the more time and money people give to their religious groups, the less they have left over for everything else. But common sense turns out to be wrong. Putnam and Campbell found that the more frequently people attend religious services, the more generous and charitable they become across the board.58 Of course religious people give a lot to religious charities, but they also give as much as or more than secular folk to secular charities such as the American Cancer Society.59 They spend a lot of time in service to their churches and synagogues, but they also spend more time than secular folk serving in neighborhood and civic associations of all sorts. Putnam and Campbell put their findings bluntly: By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.60 Why are religious people better neighbors and citizens? To find out, Putnam and Campbell included on one of their surveys a long list of questions about religious beliefs (e.g., “Do you believe in hell? Do you agree that we will all be called before God to answer for our sins?”) as well as questions about religious practices (e.g., “How often do you read holy scriptures? How often do you pray?”). These beliefs and practices turned out to matter very little. Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon … none of these things correlated with generosity. The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people. Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”61

Hiving comes naturally, easily, and joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, and even love. Those bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding—the nature of group selection is to suppress selfishness within groups to make them more effective at competing with other groups.

As I have said on another occasion: being 'Aryan' [Divine] is not the point, becoming 'Aryan' [Divine] is what matters. In this respect an enormous task remains to be fulfilled by all of us: the inner liberation from entangling and ensnaring Semitism [Matrix]. This is about the fundamental thinking of all world-views and all religion; there — at the beginning — the roads divide . . . leave the high roads and climb the steep mountain path — the Devayana of the ancient Aryans — that leads to the high summits. Never forget this one thing: by thinking alone thinking can be liberated; he who doesn't have the courage or the staying power to rethink the thoughts of the Aryan race of thinkers, is and will remain a servant, regardless his ancestry, for he is mentally imprisoned, blind, bound to earth.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.

Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

Eternal Rest. If I have the temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of Buḍḍha's doctrine, it is because I think that all the misconceptions of it have arisen from a failure to understand his idea of what is real and what is unreal, what worth longing and striving for and what not. From this misconception have come all the unfounded charges that Buḍḍhism is an "atheistical," that is to say, a grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding religion. Buḍḍhism denies the existence of a personal God—true: therefore—well, therefore, and notwithstanding all this, its teaching is neither what may be called properly atheistical, nihilistic, negative, nor provocative of vice. I will try to make my meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific research helps in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into two elements—matter and force;

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs?

I call for all religions, cultures, countries, crews, parties and peacemakers to unite for the sake of building a peaceful, united global village for future generations. It starts TODAY. If we stay divided, we will only remain crippled - and we will fall. It is time for everyone to see there is more for us to GAIN through unity and love than hatred and division. Get wise and unite. This is the only way. We need to start fresh with a truly united perspective.

Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us, but without our long period of tribal living there’d be nothing to divide in the first place. There’d be only small families of foragers—not nearly as sociable as today’s hunter-gatherers—eking out a living and losing most of their members to starvation during every prolonged drought. The coevolution of tribal minds and tribal cultures didn’t just prepare us for war; it also prepared us for far more peaceful coexistence

The “Muslim speech,” as we took to calling the second major address, was trickier. Beyond the negative portrayals of terrorists and oil sheikhs found on news broadcasts or in the movies, most Americans knew little about Islam. Meanwhile, surveys showed that Muslims around the world believed the United States was hostile toward their religion, and that our Middle East policy was based not on an interest in improving people’s lives but rather on maintaining oil supplies, killing terrorists, and protecting Israel. Given this divide, I told Ben that the focus of our speech had to be less about outlining new policies and more geared toward helping the two sides understand each other. That meant recognizing the extraordinary contributions of Islamic civilizations in the advancement of mathematics, science, and art and acknowledging the role colonialism had played in some of the Middle East’s ongoing struggles. It meant admitting past U.S. indifference toward corruption and repression in the region, and our complicity in the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government during the Cold War, as well as acknowledging the searing humiliations endured by Palestinians living in occupied territory. Hearing such basic history from the mouth of a U.S. president would catch many people off guard, I figured, and perhaps open their minds to other hard truths: that the Islamic fundamentalism that had come to dominate so much of the Muslim world was incompatible with the openness and tolerance that fueled modern progress; that too often Muslim leaders ginned up grievances against the West in order to distract from their own failures; that a Palestinian state would be delivered only through negotiation and compromise rather than incitements to violence and anti-Semitism; and that no society could truly succeed while systematically repressing its women. —

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their territory.

What if I told you there is no difference between us? The things that outwardly divide us disappear when we look inward, because we’re all made of the exact same energy. The same energy that formed the universe, that is the source of all major world religions, and that flows freely and abundantly through each of us. We each grow into different beliefs, paradigms, and levels of success, but we are all born as “energists”—made of the same divine, perfect, and renewable resource.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. This spirit of mutual inquiry is the very antithesis of religious faith.

It is simply anachronistic to divide ancient motivations into the religious and the political. They were tangled up together. For us, the state is—in theory—exclusively political and should not interfere in questions of personal belief, religion, faith, or God. In reality religion and politics are thoroughly entangled with one another, but we idealize the separation of church and state and the freedom of individuals to practice their religious traditions. For ancient Romans the state

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give

It’s time to stop hiding. It’s time to know your power, claim your voice, and tip the balance back toward a feminine future. To restore balance. It’s not about man vs. woman. Rulers vs. religion. Command and conquer. This is about harmony. Unity. Removing what has defined and divided us. It’s time to become activated Goddesses. Understand. These shifts are going to make your earth move. So if you know one thing, know this, that if you hold your Goddess energy, your truthful emotion, in your soul, nothing can shake you.

Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness...In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.

In each of my five test cases, we fall into an error I’ll describe in the first chapter: of supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together. Not true, I say; not true over and over again. How plausible I can make this thought will depend upon arguments, but also upon details and upon the scores of stories that illustrate my claims. There’s no dispensing with identities, but we need to understand them better if we can hope to reconfigure them, and free ourselves from mistakes about them that are often a couple of hundred years old. Much of what is dangerous about them has to do with the way identities—religion, nation, race, class, and culture—divide us and set us against one another. They can be the enemies of human solidarity, the sources of war, horsemen of a score of apocalypses from apartheid to genocide. Yet these errors are also central to the way identities unite us today. We need to reform them because, at their best, they make it possible for groups, large and small, to do things together. They are the lies that bind.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give rise to a pattern of behavior that can never be broken?

We never see any god but the personal Name that has been revealed and given concrete existence in each one of us; inevitably our understanding of our personal Lord is colored by the religious tradition into which we were born. But the mystic (arif) knows that this “God” of ours is simply an “angel” or a particular symbol of the divine, which must never be confused with the Hidden Reality itself. Consequently he sees all the different religions as valid theophanies. Where the God of the more dogmatic religions divides humanity into warring camps, the God of the mystics is a unifying force.

Humans appear to have an inbuilt, almost irresistible tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them,” good guys and bad, in-groups and out-groups. We see this everywhere: in politics, in religion, in sports and national pride. For Jesus, the poor and downtrodden were the in-group and the Pharisees and the rich the out-groups; for Marxists (much as for Jesus), the working class was the in-group and the ruling class the out-group; for the Nazis, the Aryan race was the in-group and Jews the main out-group; and for some radical feminists and “lesbian separatists,” women are the in-group and men the out-group.

There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our more cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. it seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like "God" and "paradise" and "sin" in the present that will determine our future.

The philosopher Leon Kass is among the foremost spokesmen for Shweder’s ethic of divinity, and for the Sanctity foundation on which it is based. Writing in 1997, the year after Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal, Kass lamented the way that technology often erases moral boundaries and brings people ever closer to the dangerous belief that they can do anything they want to do. In an essay titled “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Kass argued that our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims:

This issue was joined in a dispute over protection for the free exercise of religion that first divided the justices and then became the source of conflict between the Court and Congress. In a 1990 decision, the Court had withheld protection from individuals who claimed that their religious beliefs required an exemption from a generally applicable law. In that case, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, the Court ruled that American Indians who used the hallucinogenic drug peyote in religious rituals were not constitutionally entitled to unemployment benefits when they were fired for violating their employer’s rule against drug use.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as "a false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact." As an intuitionist, I'd say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It's the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the "delusion" of believing in gods (for the New Atheists). The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational children.

During this time I came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. The world is not black and white, nothing is what it seems, and we are not cartoon characters that can be divided into goodies and baddies, but complex and multi-faceted beings with many weaknesses. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there. He sometimes speaks through others and we would be wise to listen to those we trust and to our own inner voice, God’s voice. No matter how difficult or painful life sometimes becomes, we must never lose faith. We may not always find justice in this world, but compassion and forgiveness are such important qualities. They help us to dissolve so much of the negativity that we hold. Practising them mostly benefits ourselves.

This example, it seems to us, suffices to show in what way the nonreligious man of modern societies is still nourished and aided by the activity of his unconscious, yet without thereby attaining to a properly religious experience and vision of the world. The unconscious offers him solutions for the difficulties of his own life, and in this way plays the role of religion, for, before making an existence a creator of values, religion ensures its integrity, From one point of view it could almost be said that in the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious—which means too that in such men the possibility of reintegrating a religious vision of life lies at a great depth. Or, from the Christian point of view, it could also be said that nonreligion is equivalent to a new "fall" of man— in other words, that nonreligious man has lost the capacity to live religion consciously, and hence to understand and assume it; but that, in his deepest being, he still retains a memory of it, as, after the first "fall," his ancestor, the primordial man, retained intelligence enough to enable him to rediscover the traces of God that are visible in the world. After the first "fall," the religious sense descended to the level of the ' 'divided" consciousness"; now, after the second, it has fallen even further, into the depths of the unconscious; it has been "forgotten," Here the considerations of the historian of religions end. Here begins the realm of problems proper to the philosopher, the psychologist, and even the theologian.

Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Us’ is people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for ‘them’. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don’t want to see any of them in our territory, and we don’t care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human. In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people. The Dinka’s bitter enemies are the Nuer. What does the word Nuer mean in Nuer language? It means ‘original people’. Thousands of kilometres from the Sudan deserts, in the frozen ice-lands of Alaska and north-eastern Siberia, live the Yupiks. What does Yupik mean in Yupik language? It means ‘real people’.3

Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world.

I reviewed five areas of research showing that moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth: • We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us. • Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president. • With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves. • Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. • In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give rise to a pattern of behavior that can never be broken? What if we all stood equal in one another’s eyes and felt pride at our reflection? I speak of utopia and chance being ridiculed, but sitting in a village thousands of miles from everything, I will roll the dice. For one day only, maybe we could put aside our differences and come together in our sameness. For one day, we could see that past all the variations, we are all the same with similar hopes, dreams, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. For one day, we could stand together, not apart, and treat others as we would hope to be treated.

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right.32 Who was best able to pretend to be the other? The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.

I now turn to a *subjective* consideration that belongs here; yet I can give even less distinctness to it than to the objective consideration just discussed, for I shall be able to express it only by image and simile. Why is our consciousness brighter and more distinct the farther it reaches outwards, so that its greatest clearness lies in sense perception, which already half belongs to things outside us; and, on the other hand, becomes more obscure as we go inwards, and leads, when followed to its innermost recesses, into a darkness in which all knowledge ceases? Because, I say, consciousness presupposes *individuality*; but this belongs to the mere phenomenon, since, as the plurality of the homogeneous, it is conditioned by the forms of the phenomenon, time and space. On the other hand, our inner nature has its root in what is no longer phenomenon but thing-in-itself, to which therefore the forms of the phenomenon do not reach; and in this way, the chief conditions of individuality are wanting, and distinct consciousness ceases therewith. In this root-point of existence the difference of beings ceases, just as that of the radii of a sphere ceases at the centre. As in the sphere the surface is produced by the radii ending and breaking off, so consciousness is possible only where the true inner being runs out into the phenomenon. Through the forms of the phenomenon separate individuality becomes possible, and on this individuality rests consciousness, which is on this account confined to phenomena. Therefore everything distinct and really intelligible in our consciousness always lies only outwards on this surface on the sphere. But as soon as we withdraw entirely from this, consciousness forsakes us―in sleep, in death, and to a certain extent also in magnetic or magic activity; for all these lead through the centre. But just because distinct consciousness, as being conditioned by the surface of the sphere, is not directed towards the centre, it recognizes other individuals certainly as of the same kind, but not as identical, which, however, they are in themselves. Immortality of the individual could be compared to the flying off at a tangent of a point on the surface; but immortality, by virtue of the eternity of the true inner being of the whole phenomenon, is comparable to the return of that point on the radius to the centre, whose mere extension is the surface. The will as thing-in-itself is entire and undivided in every being, just as the centre is an integral part of every radius; whereas the peripheral end of this radius is in the most rapid revolution with the surface that represents time and its content, the other end at the centre where eternity lies, remains in profoundest peace, because the centre is the point whose rising half is no different from the sinking half. Therefore, it is said also in the *Bhagavad-Gita*: *Haud distributum animantibus, et quasi distributum tamen insidens, animantiumque sustentaculum id cognoscendum, edax et rursus genitale* (xiii, 16, trans. Schlegel) [Undivided it dwells in beings, and yet as it were divided; it is to be known as the sustainer, annihilator, and producer of beings]. Here, of course, we fall into mystical and metaphorical language, but it is the only language in which anything can be said about this wholly transcendent theme.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. To demonstrate the strategic functions of moral reasoning, I reviewed five areas of research showing that moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth: We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us. Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president. With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves. Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

Roughly 25 percent of humanity is Muslim. For every Jew, there are roughly one hundred twenty-five Muslims. Judaism is about 2500 years older than Islam, and yet it has not been able to attract nearly as many followers. If we construe religions as memeplexes (a collection of interconnected memes), to borrow Richard Dawkin's term, the Islamic memeplex has been extraordinarily more successful than its Jewish counterpart (from an epidemiological perspective, that is). Why is that? To answer this important question, we must look at the contents of the two respective memeplexes to examine why one is more "infectious" than the other. Let us explore the rules for converting into the two religions and apostatizing out of them. In Judaism, the religious process for conversion is onerous, requiring several years of commitment and an absence of ulterior motive. (For example, converting to Judaism because you are marrying a Jewish person is considered an ulterior motive). Not surprisingly, given the barriers to entry, relatively few people convert to Judaism. On the other hand, to convert to Islam simply requires that one proclaim openly the sentence, the shahada (the testimony): "There is no true god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." It does not require a sophisticated epidemiological model to predict which memeplex will spread more rapidly. Let us now suppose that one wishes to leave the religion. While the Old Testament does mention the death penalty for apostasy, it has seldom been applied throughout Jewish history, whereas to this day apostasy from Islam does lead to the death penalty in several Islamic countries. But perhaps the most important difference is that Judaism does not promote or encourage proselytizing, whereas it is a central religious obligation in Islam. According to Islam, the world is divided into dar al-hard (the house of war) and dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Peace will arrive when the entire world is united under the flag of Allah. Hence, it is imperative to Islamize the nations within dar al-harb. There is only one Jewish country in the world, Israel, and it has a sizeable non-Jewish minority. But there are fifty-seven member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. As they put it, “skilled arguers … are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.”50 This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful, and so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.51 It’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic mind).

Is that what God does? He helps? Tell me, why didn't God help my innocent friend who died for no reason while the guilty roam free? Okay, fine. Forget the one-offs. How about the countless wars declared in his name? Okay, fine. Let's skip the random, meaningless murder for a second, shall we? How about the racist, sexist, phobia soup we've all been drowning in because of him? And I'm not just talking about Jesus. I'm talking about all organized religion... Exclusive groups created to manage control, a dealer getting people hooked on the drug of hope, his followers nothing but addicts who want their hit of bullshit to keep their... Their dopamine of ignorance, addicts afraid to believe the truth... That there is no order, there's no power, that all religions are just metastasizing mind worms meant to divide us so it's easier to rule us by the charlatans that want to run us. All we are to them are paying fanboys of their poorly written sci-fi franchise. If I don't listen to my imaginary friend, why the fuck should I listen to yours? People think their worship's some key to happiness. That's just how he owns you. Even I'm not crazy enough to believe that distortion of reality. So fuck God. He's not a good enough scapegoat for me.

These passages (Nietzsche, GM, 2.16) have an uncanny dual-aspect quality to them, with master morality oscillating between being a mythic trace of our wholly animal past (the articulation of a state of nature) and a specific mode of organizing the cultural dimension of any genuinely human life, and slave morality oscillating between being a later such mode and being the mythical means by which the human animal enters into culture in the first place (by dividing himself in two). Either way, however, the priests who lead the revolution are plainly possessed of an inner life of very significant depth and richness, and so must have already been marked by the very self-scrutinizing, life-denying value-system that Nietzsche’s account also tells us they create in order to marshal their slave army. But if Nietzsche finds himself affirming the paradoxical conclusion that slave morality makes possible not only its cultural hegemony but also its own existence, that indicates a fundamental tendency on his part to view this life-denying value-system as having always already left its traces on human life—as being what first makes genuinely human life possible, and indeed what first makes human beings and the world in which they live at once interesting, profound, momentous, and promising.

[Our Contemporary Lexicon] As years go by And lives are wasted, As we lose everything, We discover the real meaning Of the words shaping our lives… Words that have filled our contemporary lexicon, We know the words yet don’t fully grasp them, And the more we hear them, The more confusing they become… Words like War Bank Justice Media Capital Investment Advertisement Weapon School University Hospital Humanitarian organization Civil society Ethnicity Race Religion Modernity Backwardness Secularism Trade Love Family Prison Home Immigration Visa Passport Borders Democracy Elections Car Plane And countless others… Words that may pretend to oppose each other publicly, Yet are secretly in bed with each other Making love, acting as synonyms and French kissing… Words that in reality Walk hand in hand and are united against us To achieve the mutual goal of depriving most of us Of having a decent life with dignity… Words used by allies and foes alike, as needed! Words that have become rustier than our souls, Yet their fake glitter continues to deceive millions upon billions Of people believing faithfully in them Or working hard to access their imagined benefits... As years go by, We learn late in the game That all the meanings we ascribed to such words Are in fact killing us Raping us In the homeland On the border And in exile! As the game continues, At a late hour, We discover that Our worries and sleepless nights In hopes of a bearable world Have all been wasted in vain… What is happening today Has happened throughout history… And the game shall continue Until we reexamine this lexicon Until we destroy it And rewrite all its pages To erase all the monsters its words Within all of us… (February 6, 2015)

RED JACKET, SAGOYEWATHA (Seneca) “We like our religion, and do not want another” (May 1811) Red Jacket (c. 1751-1830) addressed Reverend Alexander, from New York City, during a Seneca council at Buffalo Creek. Brother!—We listened to the talk you delivered us from the Council of Black-Coats, in New York. We have fully considered your talk, and the offers you have made us. We now return our answer, which we wish you also to understand. In making up our minds, we have looked back to remember what has been done in our days, and what our fathers have told us was done in old times. Brother!—Great numbers of Black-Coats have been among the Indians. With sweet voices and smiling faces, they offered to teach them the religion of the white people. Our brethren in the East listened to them. They turned from the religion of their fathers, and took up the religion of the white people. What good has it done? Are they more friendly one to another than we are? No, Brother! They are a divided people—we are united. They quarrel about religion—we live in love and friendship. Besides, they drink strong waters. And they have learned how to cheat, and how to practice all the other vices of the white people, without imitating their virtues. Brother!—If you wish us well, keep away; do not disturb us. Brother!—We do not worship the Great Spirit as the white people do, but we believe that the forms of worship are indifferent to the Great Spirit. It is the homage of sincere hearts that pleases him, and we worship him in that manner. According to your religion, we must believe in a Father and Son, or we shall not be happy hereafter. We have always believed in a Father, and we worship him as our old men taught us. Your book says that the Son was sent on Earth by the Father. Did all the people who saw the Son believe him? No! they did not. And if you have read the book, the consequence must be known to you. Brother!—You wish us to change our religion for yours. We like our religion, and do not want another. Our friends here [pointing to Mr. Granger, the Indian Agent, and two other whites] do us great good; they counsel us in trouble; they teach us how to be comfortable at all times. Our friends the Quakers do more. They give us ploughs, and teach us how to use them. They tell us we are accountable beings. But they do not tell us we must change our religion.—we are satisfied with what they do, and with what they say. SOURCE: B.B. Thatcher. Indian Life and Battles. Akron: New Werner Company, 1910. 312—314. Brother!—for these reasons we cannot receive your offers. We have other things to do, and beg you to make your mind easy, without troubling us, lest our heads should be too much loaded, and by and by burst.

To-day I want those who heard the last paper to consider the question as to whether they can agree that their acquired and unchallenged attitudes receive their secret force from this intractable and violent basis of what orthodox religion calls "unregenerate Man" —that is, Man not yet re-born in himself. I believe, from my own observation, that this is the case. Now when a man observes himself, he observes a lot of things that have their own importance, but he does not observe his attitudes. To speak with exaggeration, I may believe myself God—as so many lunatics do, which shews you how close this idea is to people. Since I believe myself God, I will never think of observing this in myself. Why? Because I take this attitude for granted. To believe oneself God is an attitude. So of course I will never think of observing that. Well, it is just the same with all attitudes. One simply accepts them—or, rather, one simply does not know that one has them, so one does not think of observing them. In fact, one simply cannot observe them and cannot hear anyone who is such a fool as to try to call attention to them. You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

The ongoing culture war, whose existence if often denied by its chief antagonists, is no longer something that any of us can afford to ignore. Culture warriors have always been small in number, but lately, they have inveigled their way into positions of power and influence. As a result, the sphere of combat has extended into our homes, our schools, our places of work. Families, friendships and other relationships have been ruined. Many of us would prefer not to participate, but weapons have been forced into our hands. Culture warriors threaten to divide us even as they claim to be healing division. They couch their regressive ideas in progressive terminology, and those who attempt to slow their momentum are quickly subdued.

The Sixteen Conclusions of Reverend Kirk In the last half of the seventeenth century, a Scottish scholar gathered all the accounts he could find about the Sleagh Maith and, in 1691, wrote an amazing manuscript entitled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. It was the first systematic attempt to describe the methods and organization of the strange creatures that plagued the farmers of Scotland. The author, Reverend Kirk, of Aberfoyle, studied theology at St. Andrews and took his degree of professor at Edinburgh. Later he served as minister for the parishes of Balquedder and Aberfoyle and died in 1692. Kirk invented the name "the Secret Commonwealth" to describe the organization of the elves. It is impossible to quote the entire text of his treatise, but we can summarize his findings about elves and other aerial creatures in the following way: 1. They have a nature that is intermediate between man and the angels. 2. Physically, they have very light and fluid bodies, which are comparable to a condensed cloud. They are particularly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will. 3. Intellectually, they are intelligent and curious. 4. They have the power to carry away anything they like. 5. They live inside the earth in caves, which they can reach through any crevice or opening where air passes. 6. When men did not inhabit most of the world, the creatures used to live there and had their own agriculture. Their civilization has left traces on the high mountains; it was flourishing at a time when the whole countryside was nothing but woods and forests. 7. At the beginning of each three-month period, they change quarters because they are unable to stay in one place. Besides, they like to travel. It is then that men have terrible encounters with them, even on the great highways. 8. Their chameleon-like bodies allow them to swim through the air with all their household. 9. They are divided into tribes. Like us, they have children, nurses, marriages, burials, etc., unless they just do this to mock our own customsor to predict terrestrial events. 10. Their houses are said to be wonderfully large and beautiful, but under most circumstances they are invisible to human eyes. Kirk compares them to enchanted islands. The houses are equipped with lamps that burn forever and fires that need no fuel. 11. They speak very little. When they do talk among themselves, their language is a kind of whistling sound. 12. Their habits and their language when they talk to humans are similar to those of local people. 13. Their philosophical system is based on the following ideas: nothing dies; all things evolve cyclically in such a way that at every cycle they are renewed and improved. Motion is the universal law. 14. They are said to have a hierarchy of leaders, but they have no visible devotion to God, no religion. 15. They have many pleasant and light books, but also serious and complex books dealing with abstract matters. 16. They can be made to appear at will before us through magic. The similarities between these observations and the story related by Facius Cardan, which antedates Kirk's manuscript by exactly two hundred years, are clear. Both Cardan and Paracelsus write, like Kirk, that a pact can be made with these creatures and that they can be made to appear and answer questions at will. Paracelsus did not care to reveal what that pact was "because of the ills that might befall those who would try it." Kirk is equally discreet on this point. And, of course, to go deeper into this matter would open the whole field of witchcraft and ceremonial magic, which is beyond my purpose in the present book.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

So I lived in their midst, always on the fringes, insignificant, and they spoke freely in my presence. I saw how little regard they had for us, how much they held us in low esteem. They did not know us, and were not really interested in knowing us either. By virtue of their faith, their mission, and their biases, they did not have to: they knew better than us, both what we needed and how we should live. I cannot discount the unparalleled work they did in education and healthcare. I would not have had a formal education had it not been part of their plan. The free dispensary was always full, rolling back childhood diseases in the region. I saw them clean the most putrid wounds with a straight face. Yet, their mission required locals to forfeit ancestral practices, including our indigenous languages, which we were forbidden from using in their presence. The essence of our being in the world, its core tenet, ingrained in us across generations, was being violently questioned. Their work demanded allegiance, utter surrender, from us. I did not realise this then, but these demands threw us off balance, divided us, made us doubt ourselves and weakened us. They birthed a cruel conflict in us, putting our loyalty to the test. We were inhabited by this childish and conflicting desire to please and resist them all at the same time. Our people claimed neither detachment from the world nor dominion over it. We did not have the universe and its mysteries, meant to be conquered, subjugated on one side, and humankind, the mighty owner of it all, on the other. We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead... we were all woven into the fabric of the world. They, however, had appropriated it, simplified it to make it intelligible and malleable. They had invented words and concepts that dismissed our more complex and comprehensive intuitive understanding of reality. There is no denying that, seen through their eyes, conceptualised in their terms, the world was unmistakeably coherent, logical. For those of us who embraced the mysteries of the world, the encounter was a matter of course, and a tragedy. I doubt we will ever fully grasp the exact extent of our distress. Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic. There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price. The sole measure of success is material. Our paths in life are already charted, marked out, and you can choose to follow... the path assigned to you. A promise of comfort, a ready-made life so enticing it warrants universalisation; a dream no human should be denied. Masters, gurus travel the world to guide lost peoples towards this path of salvation, readily resorting to violence to crush every resistance, driven by the firm conviction that their philosophy is the philosophy and their religion the religion. Perhaps it spread so far and wide due to the active proselytism inherent to the Western vision of the world, or maybe it was so easy to replicate because it was the most simplistic doctrine ever developed by humans—it did a better job of dismissing our diversity and disregarding the complexity of our being. Our material realities would become more bearable, that was the promise. It mattered not that this would devastate nature and leave our inner beings shuddering with anxiety.

Let our religions unite us for human kindness rather than dividing us on what we believe. Merry Christmas

What we mean, in the last resort, by 'an answer to prayer', is that from the beginning of time, before he set about the building of the worlds, God foreknew every prayer that human lips would breathe, and took it into account. That, and nothing less, is the staggering claim which we make every time we say the 'Our Father'. If I could have collected all the symposiasts in a room, this is the issue I would have put to them, to 'try their spirits'. By all means (I would have said) let us leave dogma on one side, let us take no notice of all the secular disputes which divide the sympathies of Christian people, let us refrain as far as possible from prying into the mysterious secrets, too high for our ken. But- do you believe that God runs the world, and cares what happens in the world? For, if so, you will have to find something better than a pale, pantheist abstraction to satisfy your notion of God. And if not, you may spare your inkstands; nothing you can tell us about your religion will ever strengthen an infirm purpose or heal a broken heart.

[W]e were fighting one another instead of those who'd sent us there. Oh, they're clever these capitalists. It's hard to beat them at their game. They've got us fooled with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they've got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he's better than the other.

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. To demonstrate the strategic functions of moral reasoning, I reviewed five areas of research showing that moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth: • We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us. • Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president. • With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves. • Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. • In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

Zhong has also shown the reverse process: immorality makes people want to get clean. People who are asked to recall their own moral transgressions, or merely to copy by hand an account of someone else’s moral transgression, find themselves thinking about cleanliness more often, and wanting more strongly to cleanse themselves.26 They are more likely to select hand wipes and other cleaning products when given a choice of consumer products to take home with them after the experiment. Zhong calls this the Macbeth effect, named for Lady Macbeth’s obsession with water and cleansing after she goads her husband into murdering King Duncan. (She goes from “A little water clears us of this deed” to “Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!”)

In other words, under normal circumstances the rider takes its cue from the elephant, just as a lawyer takes instructions from a client. But if you force the two to sit around and chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources. Intuitions come first, and under normal circumstances they cause us to engage in socially strategic reasoning, but there are ways to make the relationship more of a two-way street.

We too often forget," says Spencer at the outset, "that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil/ but generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous." He proposes, therefore, to examine religious ideas, with a view to finding that core of truth which under the changing form of many faiths, has given to religion its persistent power over the human soul. What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, "God made the world," the child's unanswerable query comes, "Who made God?" All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable. All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule: we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible, which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility, which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. "Ultimate scientific ideas," then, "are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended. ... In all directions the scientist's investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known." The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley's word, is agnosticism.

The current fascination with Asian religions is a direct Grail quest. The Asia never fractured as we westerners did, and they never divided the secular and sacred worlds so tragically as we did. No traditional Asian ever strays far from the Grail castle. Asian teachers look at us and say, "What in the world is this great hurry and hunger in you people?" Someone spoke of us as "those aryan birds of prey." A people in the grips of so urgent a quest are indeed formidable.

The current fascination with Asian religions is a direct Grail quest. The Asia never fractured as we westerners did, and they never divided the secular and sacred worlds so tragically as we did. No traditional Asian ever strays far from the Grail castle. Asian teachers look at us and say, "What in the world is this great hurry and hunger in you people?" Someone spoke of us as "those aryan birds of prey." A people in the grips of so urgent a quest are indeed formidable.

Beliefs divide us; values unite us." Godless - Living a Valuable Life beyond Beliefs.

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too fleeting to be called emotions (for example, the subtle feelings you get just from reading the words happiness and disgust).

If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.”50 It’s such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode.

When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups.4 We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players. Stated

The nihilistic doctrine is stated not only in the various Prajnya-sutras (the books having Prajnya-paramita in their titles), but also in almost all Mahayana sutras. The above-mentioned three doctrines were preached (by the Buddha) in the three successive periods. But this doctrine was not preached at any particular period; it was intended to destroy at any time the attachment to the phenomenal objects. Therefore Nagarjuna tells us that there are two sorts of Prajnyas, the Common and the Special. The Çravakas (lit., hearers) and the Pratyekabuddhas (lit., singly enlightened ones), or the Hinayanists, could hear and believe in, with the Bodhisattvas or the Mahayanists, the Common Prajnya, as it was intended to destroy their attachment to the external objects. Bodhisattvas alone could understand the Special Prajnya, as it secretly revealed the Buddha nature, or the Absolute. Each of the two great Indian teachers, Çilabhadra and Jnyanaprabha, divided the whole teachings of the Buddha into three periods. (According to Çilabhadra, A.D. 625, teacher of Hiuen Tsang, the Buddha first preached the doctrine of 'existence' to the effect that every living being is unreal, but things are real. All the Hinayana sutras belong to this period. Next the Buddha preached the doctrine of the middle path, in Samdhi-nirmocana-sutra and others, to the effect that all the phenomenal universe is unreal, but that the mental substance is real. According to Jnyanaprabha, the Buddha first preached the doctrine of existence, next that of the existence of mental substance, and lastly that of unreality.) One says the doctrine of unreality was preached before that of Dharma-laksana, while the others say it was preached after. Here I adopt the latters' opinion." If

I do not believe there is any place in this country for any particular culture, whether it is a Hindu culture, or a Muhammadan culture or a Kanarese culture or a Gujarati culture. There are things we cannot deny, but they are not to be cultivated as advantages, they are to be treated as disadvantages, as something which divides our loyalty and takes away from us our common goal. That common goal is the building up of the feeling that we are all Indians. I do not like what some people say, that we are Indians first and Hindus afterwards or Muslims afterwards. I am not satisfied with that… I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indians last and nothing else but Indians…

WE ARE ALL HUMAN It should not matter - That we grew up On opposite banks, Opposite streets, The opposite Side of the tracks, Or opposite ends of The social ranks. It should not matter What your father did Or what was his blood, As long as you are good And full of love. It should not matter That you have more than me Or that I know more than you, Or what my job is, Or where I went to school For we are all equal -- And it's only our polarities that Make us each so unique, Individually resourceful, And every human useful. It should not matter That the media wants to Keep dividing us By reminding us that We are from different sects, With labeled and Typecasted Racial and stereotypical Defects, And that there are rules Set for every age, Religion, class and sex. "Sign over here. Put an X in the box, Then step to the left So I can see Whose next?" Nobody should ever feel Like just another statistic, And nobody Should ever feel Above or below the rest. Remember to Stand up for yourself Before you stand up to Rip the test. Stand up for all that's unfair And speak out for what's Always right and best. It should not matter If you are Chinese, Black, white or Cuban. If you seriously do realize That we are all just human. WE ARE ALL HUMAN by Suzy Kassem

It may sound depressing to think that our righteous minds are basically tribal minds, but consider the alternative. Our tribal minds make it easy to divide us,

When you eliminate the race, the religion, the riches and the regions that divide us, you will realize that all humans are the same.

He said: ‘…I do not believe there is any place in this country for any particular culture, whether it is a Hindu culture, or a Muhammadan culture or a Kanarese culture or a Gujarati culture. There are things we cannot deny, but they are not to be cultivated as advantages, they are to be treated as disadvantages, as something which divides our loyalty and takes away from us our common goal. That common goal is the building up of the feeling that we are all Indians. I do not like what some people say, that we are Indians first and Hindus afterwards or Muslims afterwards. I am not satisfied with that… I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indians last and nothing else but Indians…’ These are words that are as relevant today as in 1938 when they were first spoken. We ignore them at our peril. D.

For most of us, it’s not every day or even every month that we change our mind about a moral issue without any prompting from anyone else. Far more common than such private mind changing is social influence.

What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg.7 Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are a Glauconian.

found a way to forge a sense of “we” that extended beyond kinship. We trust and cooperate more readily with people who look and sound like us.69 We expect them to share our values and norms.

Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation—our sense of “higher” and “lower.” It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality.

If Mill’s harm principle prevents us from outlawing their actions, then Mill’s harm principle seems inadequate as the basis for a moral community. Whether or not God exists, people feel that some things, actions, and people are noble, pure, and elevated; others are base, polluted, and degraded.

My friend Jonathan Martin, who is a third-generation Pentecostal preacher, described the election of Donald Trump as an apocalyptic event—not in the sense that it brought on the end of the world, but in the sense that it uncovered, or revealed, divides and contours in the American social landscape many of us did not want to face, deep rifts regarding race, religion, nationalism, gender, and fear.

And God is meant to be the home of our souls. Christ came into the world to bring us back to God, and unless we take Christ for what God intended we should, our religion will always be a divided one.

The additional problem with all these proofs [of the immortality of the soul] is that in their attempt to affirm the existence of another world, they in fact undermine the reality and the value of this visible world. It is, of course, the perennial argument: things are awful here, therefore let us look forward to what awaits us on the other side. Ironically, it is because of our cynicism and our rejection of the only world given to us, against this rejection, against its devaluing, against its demeaning, that a great revolt occurred in the world. It is precisely on account of such a view that man abandoned religion. For, can it really be that God created the world and life and all of its beauty, all of its possibilities, only in order that man would reject them and forego all these glorious possibilities in the name of some unknown and only vaguely promised *other* world? And the reasoning goes, 'Well, since all religions are calling us to such an understanding - let's throw out religion altogether, we can survive well enough without it, we can live a far better life here on earth.' The result is that humanity seems to be divided into two camps, which are constantly in conflict with each other - and all on account of man's conception of death and its total ambiguity. Partisans of one camp, in defending that other world beyond the grave, truly belittle this world and its life; they yield to its meaninglessness and its evil, for they say that only in the other world one no longer finds meaninglessness or evil. The other camp defends this world; in the name of the now, it rejects any possibility of eternity, and in so doing it de facto reduces man to an accidental, transitory, and temporal occurrence.

 This union of two natures in Christ's one Person is doubtless one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian religion. It needs to be carefully stated. It is just one of those great truths which are not meant to be curiously pried into, but to be reverently believed. Nowhere, perhaps, shall we find a more wise and judicious statement than in the second article of the Church of England. "The Son, who is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man's nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin of her substance--so that two whole and perfect natures, that is to say, the Godhead and the manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, truly God and truly man." This is a most valuable declaration. This is "sound speech, which cannot be condemned."                But while we do not pretend to explain the union of two natures in our Lord Jesus Christ's Person, we must not hesitate to fence the subject with well-defined cautions. While we state most carefully what we do believe, we must not shrink from declaring boldly what we do not believe. We must never forget, that though our Lord was God and man at the same time, the divine and human natures in Him were never confounded. One nature did not swallow up the other. The two natures remained perfect and distinct. The divinity of Christ was never for a moment laid aside, although veiled. The manhood of Christ, during His life-time, was never for a moment unlike our own, though by union with the Godhead, greatly dignified. Though perfect God, Christ has always been perfect man from the first moment of His incarnation. He who is gone into heaven, and is sitting at the Father's right hand to intercede for sinners, is man as well as God. Though perfect man, Christ never ceased to be perfect God. He that suffered for sin on the cross, and was made sin for us, was "God manifest in the flesh." The blood with which the Church was purchased, is called the blood "of God." (Acts 20:28.) Though He became "flesh" in the fullest sense, when He was born of the Virgin Mary, He never at any period ceased to be the Eternal Word.

(Humans can be turned into suicide bombers, but it takes a great deal of training, pressure, and psychological manipulation. It doesn’t come naturally to us.)

Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules make us strategically altruistic, not reliably or universally altruistic.

As a result of all these difficulties, [the solution to the mode of] the division of the fields must be sought exclusively in religion. For when men are ferocious and wild, and their only equality consists in the equality of their ferocious and wild natures, should they ever have united without the force of arms or the rule of law, the only possible way in which they can have done so is through belief in the force and strength of a nature superior to anything human and through the idea that this superior force has constrained them to unite. This leads us led to meditate on the long and deceptive labour of Providence, whereby those of Grotius’s simpletons who were more awakened from their stupor, were roused by the first thunderbolts after the Flood and took them to be the warnings of a divinity who was the product of their own imagination. Hence they occupied the first empty lands, where they stayed with certain women and, having settled on them, begot certain races, buried their dead and, on specific occasions afforded them by religion, burnt the forests, ploughed the land and sowed it with wheat. Thus they laid down the boundaries of the fields, investing them with fierce superstitions through which, in ferocious defence of their clans, they defended them with the blood of the impious vagabonds who came, divided and alone, for they lacked any under standing of the strength of society, to steal the wheat, and were killed in the course of their theft.

As a result of all these difficulties, [the solution to the mode of] the division of the fields must be sought exclusively in religion. For when men are ferocious and wild, and their only equality consists in the equality of their ferocious and wild natures, should they ever have united without the force of arms or the rule of law, the only possible way in which they can have done so is through belief in the force and strength of a nature superior to anything human and through the idea that this superior force has constrained them to unite. This leads us led to meditate on the long and deceptive labour of Providence, whereby those of Grotius’s simpletons who were more awakened from their stupor, were roused by the first thunderbolts after the Flood and took them to be the warnings of a divinity who was the product of their own imagination. Hence they occupied the first empty lands, where they stayed with certain women and, having settled on them, begot certain races, buried their dead and, on specific occasions afforded them by religion, burnt the forests, ploughed the land and sowed it with wheat. Thus they laid down the boundaries of the fields, investing them with fierce superstitions through which, in ferocious defence of their clans, they defended them with the blood of the impious vagabonds who came, divided and alone, for they lacked any under standing of the strength of society, to steal the wheat, and were killed in the course of their theft.

Religion can't separate us, politics can't divide us, wealth can't classify us. We're all one! We're children of LOVE!

The problem is that faith based upon twisted information is nothing more than delusion—and delusion leads to division. It divided humanity, taking us into endless wars—separating us by race, religion, and politics.

We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment. We reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

There are so many forces in the world that divide us deeply and murderously. We cannot escape politics, history, religion, nationalism – for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. In a world where the road to the new tyrannies is paved with the fear of others, we need to rediscover that we are neither alone, nor in the end that different, that what joins us is always more important than what divides us, and that the price of division is ever the obscenity of oppression.

HOW DOES THIS RADICAL conceptual divide over whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity play out in relations between the two communities? One manifestation is the lack of political cooperation between Israeli and American Jewish progressives. Though right-of-center American Jews are often active in supporting Israel’s right-leaning parties and offer financial support through American Friends of Likud and other organizations, there has been surprisingly little alignment between liberal American Jews and the Israeli political left.* There is, of course, some American organizational support for Israel’s left-leaning parties, but the relationship on the left is not nearly as vigorous as it is on the right. Why is that? Once again, the answer lies largely in the Judaism-as-religion issue, which makes it difficult for the two communities to understand each other. Einat Wilf—a secular and unabashedly nationalist former Knesset member and outspoken voice for liberal causes—is a compelling example of how Judaism-as-religion versus Judaism-as-nation creates a disconnect between the two communities. In 2018, she published a book titled The War over the Right of Return, in which she argues that the fundamental reason the Israeli-Arab conflict has never been settled has been Israel’s refusal to reject outright the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” of 1948 refugees and their descendants.* The fact that millions of Palestinians still harbor a hope of returning to “Palestine,” argues Wilf, leaves open in their minds the possibility that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can still be ended. End that charade, she argues, and one major obstacle on the road to settling the conflict will have been removed. What matters for us is not whether Wilf’s analysis is right or wrong. What we need to note is that there is scarcely an American Jewish liberal who would dare speak aloud about denying the Palestinian right of return once and for all. How does Wilf straddle the fence, some might ask? How can she be both a liberal and such a committed nationalist? To Wilf, as to many Israelis, there is simply no fence to straddle. For many Israeli progressives like her, there is no tension at all between liberal values and Judaism-as-nation. But for American Jews who see themselves primarily as a religion and not a nation, Wilf’s value set is a much more difficult position to adopt. The disconnect is between Judaism-as-justice and Judaism-as-survival. Those are obviously not always incompatible, but they are profoundly different instincts.

Not speaking Hebrew is not a moral flaw, and today’s American Jews have no access to Hebrew because of decisions that other people made. Nor can their lack of knowledge of Hebrew be fairly seen as an indication that American Jews are not wise or do not care. Their lack of facility with Hebrew, however, even on the most rudimentary level, limits them to encountering Israel through the lens of what the English-language press decides they should read, without direct access to Israel’s press, literature, music, television, or culture. How passionate could any human relationship be if almost every interaction was lived through a filter someone else had constructed? WHETHER JUDAISM IS A religion or a people is no mere academic matter. It is also not a matter of right or wrong. American Judaism had good reason to be attracted by Judaism-as-religion. Zionists had equally good reason for opting for peoplehood over religion. What is critical for us to understand is that the divide that Jews now confront reflects the roots of each of these communities and how Jews in each place define what it means to be a Jew.

Religion is paradoxical. It emerged out of intergroup competition, yet it has a remarkable power to unite. It sets people apart from one another, yet can also draw vastly different people together. Long ago we envisioned relationship with spiritual beings. In one sense these relationships were very mundane -they served practical human needs. The practical side of these relationships is also the source of their power to divide us, to pit one group against another. The divine side is in their capacity to quietly but persistently call us to transcend ourselves and find common ground for trust.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary

Our human situation divides us over and over again into ego-shadow opposition, not matter where we start. This is probably why St. Augustine said, “To act is to sin.” As long as we take our place in society, we will pay for it by bearing a shadow. And society will pay a general price with collective phenomena such as war, violence, racism. This is why the religious life speaks of another realm, heaven, and of the millennium, as the culmination of the inner life. Culture and religion have different aims.

Example 2. Schmidt’s method began with the indisputable observation that the history of human people is a long story of innumerable migrations. So, let us imagine a geographical area occupied by two different tribes, call them A and B, and that a part of the territory occupied by tribe A bisects the territory of tribe B, as shown in Figure 1.3. Figure 1.3. Geographical layout of two hypothetical cultures It is a safe assumption that one tribe migrated into the area ahead of the other one.[21] If A arrived earlier, then B would presumably have appeared as a unified tribe, but then split up and settled on the two sides of A’s unusually narrow extension. The previously unencumbered existence of this extension would be rather unusual since B’s settlement demonstrates that both adjoining sides are capable of sustaining life. On the other hand, if B had settled there earlier, it would have existed as a geographically unified tribe for a time until it was divided by A’s invasion, a far more common occurrence. Already it would appear that the latter option is more likely, but let us propose some further data to support the conclusion. Suppose that culture A has many more cultural “forms” than culture B. By forms Schmidt meant parts of objects that do not contribute directly to their pure function, such as decorations on pottery, curved ends of hunting bows or special designs on clothes. In this theoretical example we stipulate that these and other similar items are found in A, but not in B. If A had been there first, B would have needed to subdue A in A’s former territory, and we should expect to find residual forms of A’s culture (technically called “survivals”) in B’s area, but we stipulated that forms that are popular in A are not present in B’s territory. All other things being equal, it seems pretty clear that the people of tribe A came later into this territory than those of B, and that A brought cultural innovations that B is lacking. Most probably, then, B is therefore, the older culture.

Religious beliefs influence how populations reproduce with one another and how many children they have; thus, religion has evolutionary consequences (in addition to its probable evolutionary origins).

The religion's opposition to abortion stems from the centrl Christian narrative, which begins with the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be born, God had to tale control of Mary's body. If this divine act of reproduction had been interrupted by human choice, human salvation would not have been possible.

The religion's opposition to abortion stems from the centrl Christian narrative, which begins with the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be born, God had to take control of Mary's body. If this divine act of reproduction had been interrupted by human choice, human salvation would not have been possible.

Global religious beliefs about abortion therefore clearly have evolutionary implications; having an anti-abortion attitude is associated with greater fitness.

Many religious disputes at the international level also concern how particular genes are replicating.

In many traditions, the next life promises reuniting with the entire tribe in the the next world. Some conceptions of heaven exclude members of out-groups.

The extreme left promises egalitarian camaraderie for all peoples, regardless of ethnicity or religion. In practice, however, Communist governments have oppresed minority groups.

...the leftists sometimes assume that their moral beliefs about the way the world should be have a greater impact on reality than they actually do. For example, a secular leftist might oppose religion, and believe that the world would be a better place without it.

Some people describe themselves as -spiritual-. Spirituality usually entails a more xenophilic attraction to religious traditions of out-groups, with a simultaneous rejection of the limitations of one's own religion.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator—our very self-consciousness—is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. As they put it, “skilled arguers … are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.”50 This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful, and so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.51 It’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic mind).

A researcher said, “A diverse nation is a more divided nation.” Who knew? Duh! Multicultural nations are always divided, and, as Abraham Lincoln told us, a House divided against itself cannot stand. Multiculturalism must be smashed to smithereens. What we need is a diverse monoculture, as prevailed in ancient Greece, with its countless city-states, all following a common religion, language and general culture. We need competitive diversity, but an overall level of cooperation and common identity. Football teams compete with each other in a league. They all obey the rules and framework of the league, and don’t go off and do their own thing. The league is a diverse monoculture. In a multicultural system, different cultures would reject the league, and create their own leagues, or even reject football entirely, and play alien sports imported from their originating cultures. It’s time people got real. Multicultural division is a disaster. Monocultural division is competitive and enjoyable.

Is it possible to care deeply about a person you have never met, who lives far away on the other side of the ocean, who maybe speaks a different language, or who was raised in a different religion, who plays different sports? I used to think it wasn’t possible, but now I know I was wrong. Because, like the Atlantic Ocean, our common humanity unites us more than it divides us.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” ― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Humanity, so eager to have answers, grasped onto anything that had a hint of truth in it. If we couldn't explain it, we said it was a mystery. We talked ourselves into believing that God must have His own hidden agenda, one that is beyond our understanding. We blinded ourselves to the truth, ignoring logic in favor of misguided faith. The problem is that faith based upon twisted information is nothing more than delusion- and delusion leads to division. It divided humanity, taking us into endless wars- separating us by race, religion, and politics.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

MT: That's Régis Debray's thesis: the incarnation of Christ and the defeat of the iconoclasts gave the West mastery of images and thus of innovation. Here's a question that may be absurd: does a phrase like “if someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other” have anything to do with imitation? RG: Of course it does, since it's directed against “adversarial” imitation, and is one and the same thing as the imitation of Christ. In the Gospels, everything is imitation, since Christ himself seeks to imitate and be imitated. Unlike the modern gurus who claim to be imitating nobody, but who want to be imitated on that basis, Christ says: “Imitate me as I imitate the Father.” The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival. You nip rivalry in the bud. We're not talking about a political program, this is a lot simpler and more fundamental. If someone is making excessive demands on you, he's already involved in mimetic rivalry, he expects you to participate in the escalation. So, to put a stop to it, the only means is to do the opposite of what escalation calls for: meet the excessive demand twice over. If you've been told to walk a mile, walk two; if you've been hit on the left cheek, offer up the right. The Kingdom of God is nothing but this, but that doesn't mean it's easily accessible. There is also a pretty strong unwritten tradition that states that “Satan is the ape of God.” Satan is extremely paradoxical in the Gospels. First he is mimetic disorder, but he is also order because he is the prince of this world. When the Pharisees accuse him of freeing the possessed from their demons by the power of “Beelzebub,” Jesus replies: “Now if Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself; so how can his kingdom last? […] But if it is through the Spirit of God that I drive out devils, then be sure that the kingdom of God has caught you unawares.” This means that Satan's order is the order of the scapegoat. Satan is the whole mimetic system in the Gospels. That Satan is temptation, that Satan is rivalry that turns against itself—all the traditions see this; succumbing to temptation always means tempting others. What the Gospel adds, and what is unique to it, I think, is that Satan is order. The order of this world is not divine, it's sacrificial, it's satanic in a certain sense. That doesn't mean that religions are satanic, it means that the mimetic system, in its eternal return, enslaves humanity. Satan's transcendence is precisely that violence temporarily masters itself in the scapegoat phenomenon: Satan never expels himself once and for all—only the Spirit of God can do that—but he more or less “chains himself” by means of the sacrificial order. All medieval legends tell you: the devil asks for but one victim, but as for that victim, he can't do without it. If you don't obey the rules of the Kingdom of God, you are necessarily dependent on Satan. Satan means “the Accuser.” And the Spirit of God is called Paraclete, that is to say “the Defender of Victims,” it's all there. The defender of victims reveals the inanity of Satan by showing that his accusations are untruthful. Oedipus's parricide and incest, which give the plague to a whole community—they're a joke, a very bad joke that helps cause quite a bit of damage among us when we take it seriously, as, in the final analysis, is the case with…the psychoanalysts: they take the lie of the Accuser seriously. Our whole culture is dominated by mythical accusation to the extent that it does not denounce it. Psychoanalysis endorses the accusation.

while we observe how God has destined all things for our good and salvation, we at the same time feel his power and grace, both in ourselves and in the great blessings which he has bestowed upon us; thence stirring up ourselves to confidence in him, to invocation, praise, and love. Moreover, as I lately observed, the Lord himself, by the very order of creation, has demonstrated that he created all things for the sake of man. Nor is it unimportant to observe, that he divided the formation of the world into six days, though it had been in no respect more difficult to complete the whole work, in all its parts, in one moment than by a gradual progression. But he was pleased to display his providence and paternal care towards us in this, that before he formed man, he provided whatever he foresaw would be useful and salutary to him. How ungrateful, then, were it to doubt whether we are cared for by this most excellent Parent, who we see cared for us even before we were born! How impious were it to tremble in distrust, lest we should one day be abandoned in our necessity by that kindness which, antecedent to our existence, displayed itself in a complete supply of all good things!

Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day. Only a few of these intuitions come to us embedded in fullblown emotions.

our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims:

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

not in the sense that it brought on the end of the world, but in the sense that it uncovered, or revealed, divides and contours in the American social landscape many of us did not want to face, deep rifts regarding race, religion, nationalism, gender, and fear. It was certainly apocalyptic for me in the way that it exposed, to my shame, my reluctance to resist certain injustices in this country until the resistance movement fit more conveniently with my political persuasions.

We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.43 Yet friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments (link 3) that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.

This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.

the most likely candidates. In the rest of this book I’ll try to explain how morality can be innate (as a set of evolved intuitions) and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture). We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

The exploitative sexual caste system could not be perpetuated without the consent of the victims as well as of the dominant sex, and such consent if obtained through sex role socialization - a conditioning process which beings to operate the moment we are born, and which is enforced by most institutions. Parents, friends, teachers, textbook authors and illustrators, advertisers, those who control the mass media, toy and clothes manufacturers, professionals such a doctors and psychologists - all contribute to the socialization process. This happens through dynamics that are largely uncalculated and unconscious, yet which reinforce the assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements of sexually hierarchical society. The fact of womne's low caste status has been - and is - disguised. It is masked, first of all, by sex role segregation, as in a ghetto, for it makes possible the delusion that women should be "equal but different". Sexual caste is hidden also by the fact that women have various forms of *derivative status* as a consequence of relationships with men. That is, women have duality of status, and the derivative aspect of this status - for example, as daughters and wives - divides us against each other and encourages identification with patriarchal institutions which serve the interests of men at the expense of women. Finally sexual caste is hidden by ideologies that bestow false identities upon women and men. Patriarchal religion has served to perpetuate all of these dynamics of delusion, naming them "natural" and bestowing its supernatural blessings upon them. The system has been advertised as "according to the divine plan".

Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

But if we stop short of the personal work—if we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can reconstruct the gospel without addressing our divided souls, then we carry the germ of white supremacy with us into our most noble efforts to rid this world’s systems of racism. Nothing is uglier than the inevitable explosion when white people try to participate in antiracist work without addressing their own hidden wound. Each of us has to do our own soul work.

truly believe it’s the far-left puritans who are the greatest threat to our free, pluralistic democracy. The left’s obsession with identity politics is the reverse of the melting-pot principle that America was founded upon: a place where everyone, regardless of race, religion, and color, is welcome as long as they blend into the fabric of our (free) society. The left’s obsession with judging us on immutable characteristics is what will eventually reach a tipping point and turn neighbor against neighbor, dividing America . . . and beyond.

Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable45 and altruism seem embarrassing,46 without giving us any reasons or arguments.

when we fell, we divided ourselves into two — really three, but primarily into two — main components, which we call male and female. The right brain, which controls the left side of our body, is our feminine component, though it’s truly neither male nor female. This is where our psychic and emotional aspect lives. This component knows that there’s only one God and that oneness is all there is. Though it can’t really explain it, it just knows the truth. So there are not a lot of problems with the female component. The problem is on the left side of the brain — the male component. Because of the nature of how the male brain is oriented — a mirror image of the female — it has its logical component forward (more dominant) while the female has its logical component toward the back (less dominant). The left brain does not experience oneness when it looks out into the Reality; all it sees is division and separation. For that reason, the male aspect of us is having a difficult time down here on Earth. Even our major sacred books such as the Koran, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible have divided everything into opposites. The left brain experiences that there is God, but then there’s also the devil — perhaps not quite as strong as God, but a huge influence. So even God is seen in terms of duality, as one pole of the opposing forces of dark and light. (This is not true in all sects of these religions. A few of them see that there is only God.) Until the left brain is able to see the unity running through everything, to know that there is truly one spirit, one force, one consciousness moving through absolutely everything in existence — until it knows that unity beyond any doubt — then the mind is going to stay separated from itself, from its wholeness and from the fullness of its potential. Even if there’s the slightest doubt at all about unity, the left-brain aspect will hold us back, and we can no longer walk on water.

Etiquette books tell us not to discuss these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together.

Bees (and ants and termites) are the ultimate team players: one for all, all for one, all the time, even if that means dying to protect the hive from invaders.14 (Humans can be turned into suicide bombers, but it takes a great deal of training, pressure, and psychological manipulation. It doesn’t come naturally to us.)

In the Great Dividing Range I crave to repent. In filtered tree fern light I confess the sins of my tribe: we worship the future, demean the past, pay no mind to the present. But a future, cut off from the promise of ever joining history, lies ahead dead on its altar while we chew on our restless feet. What's to become of our own seeds and betrothals: all these floss-haired children inside us that want to live? Want to move, stay, eat the soil from under the house, move on. Want to hold fast but cannot hold still. I am lifting them up as newborns to the nursery window looking out on the forests of Antarctica. I tell them: This is your home. Tell them: None of this is yours. Do not believe as I did. When the world breaks open, fall apart with her entrails, fall with the stones or fly. Let the crush of it make you into some new thing not yourself. See how these trees take the teat of the world and suckle it, drinking time, knowing it is perfect with or without them. Lacking their religion, you will have to make your own. You are the world that stirs. This is the world that waits.

The Complete Incarnation Krishna is utterly incomparable, he is so unique. Firstly, his uniqueness lies in the fact that although Krishna happened in the ancient past he belongs to the future, is really of the future. Man has yet to grow to that height where he can be a contemporary of Krishna's. He is still beyond man's understanding; he continues to puzzle and battle us. Only in some future time will we be able to understand him and appreciate his virtues. And there are good reasons for it. The most important reason is that Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and sad-looking - like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing. Religions of the past were all life-denying and masochistic, extolling sorrow and suffering as great virtues. If you set aside Krishna's vision of religion, then every religion of the past presented a sad and sorrowful face. A laughing religion, a religion that accepts life in its totality is yet to be born. Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations were assessed as imperfect and incomplete. Krishna has a great future. After Freud the world of religion is not going to be the same as it was before him. Freud stands as a watershed between the religions of the past and the religion of the future. With Freud a great revolution has taken place and man's consciousness has achieved a breakthrough. We shall never be the same again after Freud. A new peak of consciousness has been touched and a new understanding, an altogether new perspective, a new vision of life has come into being. And it is essential to understand it rightly. With Freud a new kind of awareness has dawned on man: that suppression is wrong, that suppression brings with it nothing but self-pity and anguish. If a man fights with himself he can only ruin and destroy himself. If I make my left hand fight with my right hand, neither is going to win, but in the end the contest will certainly destroy me. While my two hands fight with themselves, I and I alone will be destroyed in the process. That is how, through denial and suppression of his natural instincts and emotions, man became suicidal and killed himself. Krishna alone seems to be relevant to the new awareness, to the new understanding that came to man in the wake of Freud and his findings. It is so because in the whole history of the old humanity Krishna alone is against repression. That is why Krishna has great significance for the future. And his significance will continue to grow with the passage of time. ...when the suppressive religions of the world have been consigned to the wastebasket of history, Krishna's flame will be heading towards its peak, moving towards the pinnacle of its brilliance. It will be so because, for the first time, man will be able to comprehend him, to understand him and to imbibe him. And it will be so because, for the first time, man will really deserve him and his blessings.

Sadly, in many ways, our denominations separate us from our brothers and sisters in Christ. They can make it easier to take our focus off him. For example, I’ve seen this. When asked, “What’s your religion?”, people respond with, “I’m Catholic.” Or I’m “Baptist.” Our denomination is not our religion. If we ever get asked such a question, our response should be, “I am a Christian!” We only attend a certain church. The Lord never wants us divided by man-made ideas or doctrines. He wants all who believe to be unified in him. As we saw earlier in the image of the vine and branches.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.25

But the fact is that we care a lot about what others think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths.17

As an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It’s the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the “delusion” of believing in gods (for the New Atheists).

We wanted to know why the emotion of disgust—which clearly originated as an emotion that keeps us away from dirty and contaminating things—can now be triggered by some moral violations (such as betrayal or child abuse) but not by others (such as robbing a bank or cheating on one’s taxes).17

Imagine if there were no countries, and no religion too. If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would “be as one.

Above all, how can we continue to speak of God in ways that lead us to live divided lives, without ever addressing the significant (and valuable) differences between religious and scientific ways of thinking? People of faith may be excused for wanting to avoid the dialogue, but not for avoiding it. Our faith in an incarnational God will not allow us to ignore the physical world, nor any of its nuances.

Interviewer: In church on Sunday we sang a two hundred year old hymn with some contemporary words and the words go God you spin the whirling planets, fill the Seas and spread the plain, mould the mountains fashion blossoms call for the sunshine wind and rain. Now the scientist wouldn’t put it that way. The scientist would have said that there is a an explanation for why the planets were, for why the rain falls, for why the seas rise, for why the mountains form, but knowledge isn’t enough for us, it’s not enough to know why these things happen , we need the poetry, don’t we? Are we hardwired to seeks that kind of meaning in life that only poetry religion and writing can give us? Atwood: Probably so. Because we are a symbol making creature. We seem to need create and exist within structures of symbolism. We seem to have always done that as human beings, we usually date humanness from the point at which we discover some form of art. Art is always symbolic. … Interviewer: This God is a God of radical unpredictability and terrifying moral ambivalence. The God of the Old Testament. …. Interviewer: I heard what you said that human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years. Atwood: Yes. Interviewer: How do we know? Atwood: Oh…because we’ve read the myths. And the myths show pretty clearly what we want, what we fear, what we would like to have, what we very much would not like to have. Heaven and hell. We always wanted to fly, in the myths Gods fly. We don’t. And now everything that we do, every piece of technology we make is an extension of a fear or desire. And those human fears and desires really have not changed and they are reflected in the myths that have been with us for a long time. Interviewer: Are they true? Atwood: What is true? True means more than one thing. True means prove it, it has to be proven and in a very materialistic society that’s all it means. Another type of truth is it true about human nature? Is it true about who we are? Is it true about how we behave? People have a divided opinion about why myths continue and why they are important, and what they are… some people say they are maps of prehistory, some people say they are maps of the human mind and psyche, and some people say they are language-dependent. Interviewer: What do you mean by that? Atwood: It’s one of the characteristics of human beings that they have very elaborate languages. And these languages all have grammars and the grammars all contain past tenses and future tenses. Now dogs have languages too but we don’t think any dog has ever said to any other dog, where do dogs come from, what is the origin of dogs, and what about before that , what about before where any dogs. But because we have the kinds of languages we do, we go back in time as far as we can get, in our imagination, we want a beginning of the story and we go as far ahead in the future as we can. We want an end to the story. And it’s just not gonna be us getting born and us dying we want to place ourselves within a larger story. Here’s where we came form, here’s where we are going. And when you die this is what happens and some of those stories are happier than other but there’s always more, there’s always an and then. And then what happened… and then and then and then. Once we had that language we had to postulate either a God entity or an unknown.

In the Dangerous Game, differences in race, religion, culture, and diversity that we have celebrated as strengths in the past are weaponised, leaving us divided and vulnerable to the ideas and agendas of others.

We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us, although much of the concern is unconscious and invisible to us. • Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president. • With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves. • Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second. • In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our Creator—our very self-consciousness—is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. —Annie Dillard

Our fundamental sin is that we place ourselves in the position of God and divide the world between what we judge to be good and what we judge to be evil. And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created and saved us to do, namely, love like he loves.

The fact is clear: Western wars are backed by the Christian God, and we cannot dodge his draft because we are all Christians, regardless of the faith you profess, the church you attend, or whether you declare yourself utterly atheistic. You may be Jew or Muslim, pay tribute to your god in Santeria fashion, join with other Wiccas, but wherever you are in the Western world you are psychologically Christian, indelibly marked with the sign of the cross in your mind and in the corpuscles of your habits. Christianism is all about us, in the words we speak, the curses we utter, the repressions we fortify, the numbing we seek, and the residues of religious murders in our history. The murdered Jews, the murdered Catholics, the murdered Protestants, the murdered Mormons, heretics, deviationists, freethinkers... Once you feel your own personal soul to be distinct from the world out there, and that consciousness and conscience are lodged in that soul (and not in the world out there) and that even the impersonal selfish gene is individualized in your person, you are, psychologically, Christian. Once your first response to a dream, a bit of news, an idea divides immediately into the moral "good" or "bad," psychologically you are Christian. Once you feel sin in connection with your flesh and its impulses, again you are Christian. When a hunch comes true, a slipup is taken as an omen, and you trust in dreams, only to shake off these inklings as "superstition," you are Christian because that religion bans nondoctrinal forms of communication with the invisibles, excepting Jesus. When you turn from books and learning and instead to your inner feelings to find simple answers to complexities, you are Christian, for the Kingdom of God and the voice of His true Word, lies within. If your psychology uses names like ambivalence, weak ego, splitting, breakdown, ill-defined borders for conditions of the soul, fearing them as negative disorders, you are Christian, for these terms harbor insistence upon a unified, empowered, central authority. Once you consider the apparently aimless facts of history to be going somewhere, evolving somehow, and that hope is a virtue and not a delusion, you are Christian. You are Christian too when holding the notion that resurrection of light rather than irremediable tragedy or just bad luck lie in the tunnel of human misfortune. And you are especially an American Christian when idealizing a clean slate of childlike innocence as close to godliness. We cannot escape two thousand years of history, because we are each history incarnated, each one of us thrown up on the Western shores of here and now by violent waves of long ago. We may not admit the grip of Christianity on our psyche, but what else is collective unconsciousness but the ingrained emotional patterns and unthought thoughts that fill us with the prejudices we prefer to conceive as choices? We are Christian through and through. St. Thomas sits in our distinctions, St. Francis governs our acts of goodness, and thousands of Protestant missionaries from every sect you can name join together to give us the innate assurance that we are superior to all others and can help them see the light.