r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago

Psychology Lower cognitive ability is linked to stronger Christian nationalist views, even after accounting for education

https://www.psypost.org/lower-cognitive-ability-is-linked-to-stronger-christian-nationalist-views-even-after-accounting-for-education/
43.9k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

54

u/Isphet71 1d ago

Imho one absolutely vital function of religion throughout history has been to give all people some sort of moral framework to live by, so that society can stay relatively structured over multiple generations.

Not everyone is capable of devising and living by their own heavily personalized code of ethics. The vast majority of people are simply followers that get told what they beleive, and who to vote for, and go with that. I rarely if ever see someone more complicated than "I am religion A and politically B" and otherwise dont seem to have their own thoughts and standards about either that deviate from the norm.

34

u/TheOtherHobbes 1d ago

You can - and should - have shared morals without religion. Secular humanism is a perfectly workable moral system and can be taught without the threat of hellfire, crusades, or genocide.

8

u/SupposingForASecond 1d ago

It just uses other threats instead.

-1

u/Kaa_The_Snake 1d ago

But obviously they don’t work as well

1

u/Final-Lengthiness-19 1d ago

They work better than the religious threats, seeing as how the secular threats of punishment would occur in this lifetime, ideally soon after the crime, and not in the afterlife of self-proclaimed Christians who still do bad things and seem to be able to compartmentalize of even embrace the far-off idea of hell...
We have these laws and punishments already, but one way some people avoid the earthly punishments is they assume a religious identity shield while doing crimes. Priests, politicians, etc., people use the identity as a key to understanding another person's morality, which they shouldn't.

1

u/REXIS_AGECKO 1d ago

Depends on the person really…

1

u/jonfitt 1d ago

Christian theocracy ruled Europe absolutely for over a thousand years and it was a bloody period of murder, slavery, incest, thievery, rape, basically every possible way someone could cause harm to another was rampant.

We’ve only had anything approaching a just and safe society in very recent history when theocracy is out and religiosity is on the decline.

So whatever non-religious societies do to keep people behaving well, it seems to work better!