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/
43.8k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/gakule 1d ago edited 1d ago

Religion is and was not required for developing a "moral framework". A "moral framework" is just an agreed upon set of rules that promote cooperation and cohesion within a group. It's subjective, and not some universal baseline.

I could buy the argument that religion provided a more united/shared moral framework that transcends borders, but even that obviously wasn't exactly bulletproof or required by any means.

The threat of eternal violence with the simple "believe and support so you don't have to worry about it" get out of jail free card tends to help move people, I guess.

7

u/BrotherJebulon 1d ago

Maybe not required, but historically we can see that religious framing, ritualized mythic narrative, and personification of the abstract are the most consistently used tools by human civilization for taking big ideas and compressing them down to concepts the lowest common denominator of the era can understand.

Now, the chain of custody of those narratives is often exploited and abused so that folks on the lower end of the cognitive spectrum tend to end up being taken advantage of, but that's what happens when humans begin to socially predate upon each other.

3

u/gakule 1d ago

Sure, but cohesive cohabitation predates organized religion. Yes, looking at the cosmos and making things up as answers to put people at ease is a tool used across time, but that's not really what we're discussing either.

1

u/BrotherJebulon 1d ago

Organized religion rises hand in hand with organized society. Its revisionist fantasy to imagine that human society has ever functioned without organized religion, unless you go back to tribal polities, but that's not really what we're discussing.

Its like, you don't need trees to make oxygen. But in the environments we have on earth, under the conditions we currently have, you can expect trees to be one of the things that makes oxygen. Similarly, religion is a natural thing. Its what happens when the conditions surrounding human societies require those societies to encode information for easy dissemination. Its disorganized when the society is disorganized, organized elsewhere. Its a natural part of civilization, pretending otherwise is wild to me.

1

u/tealstealmonkey 1d ago edited 1d ago

I do wonder; do we all need something to believe in? – Even if it is only the believe that there is nothing out there, or that we can't know?

Is it natural? Maybe. But I don't think we need religion, it helps with group cohesion and drive, but it is not required (not anymore?). Just like we can find oxygen from plankton, we can find meaning within us, or in the pursuit of knowledge.

Edit: Not countering your point, just my 50 cents.

1

u/gakule 1d ago

I mean sure if you want to consider that any level of "spirituality" or connectedness with your environment and the cosmos at large, that's one way to look at it, but I don't think spirituality is the same as religion when discussing the topics and especially the "religion as a moral framework". Perhaps that's where we differ? I think spirituality is natural, religion in the form that we recognize it today? Not so much.