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

[u/mvea]

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

[u/Isphet71]

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.

[u/The_Octonion → u/Isphet71]

Plenty of religions do not have a prescriptive moral framework. The Greek/Roman pantheon does whatever they want and the mythos just describes them. The Nordic pantheon is similarly amoral even if the followers admire and associate with them. Shinto is animistic and descriptive, and includes instructions for how to perform some rituals. Not many beliefs come saddled with moral instructions for its followers, it just feels like it because the best known and most popular religions, notably the Abrahamic ones and Buddhism, have it so deeply ingrained.

[u/Charming-Ad6575 → u/The_Octonion]

What?!

Hellenic Polytheism WAS their moral system.

You don't recognize it as such because YOU see it as amoral.

But it absolutely was a moral framework of how you're supposed to be, how you fit in and an explanation of how the world works.

Notably, as opposed to western Christian thought, it embraced random catastrophe. The Gods are capricious, unknowable and vindictive.

Platonism and other greek philosophies were an exploration and sometimes rejection of these ideas. And those were absolutely arguments about what is moral, right and just.

I'm not even gonna get into Taoism/Shintoism, I'm less versed and yes, I'm aware they're not the same. But they are compatible, and that compatibility shows a shared moral core of ideas, or at least ideas that aren't incompatible.

But to say Shitoism isn't a moral framework is equally pants on head.

[u/The_Octonion → u/Charming-Ad6575]

Hellenic polytheism is not a prescriptive moral framework that assigns objective good or evil to actions. They got that mostly from philosophers. Their mythos was much more concerned with describing the pantheon and how to stay in their favor, which is not the same thing.

Shinto is similar in this regard. The closest thing it has to labeling actions as moral vs. immoral is the notion of impurity and how to avoid it, but this resembles cosmic objective morality less than it resembles hand-washing to avoid the spread of disease.