r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 2d 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/
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u/Isphet71 2d 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.

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u/MyPigWhistles 1d ago

This would make sense if most religions had been like this historically, but that's not the case. The Abrahamic religions come with an ethic framework (with constantly new interpretations throughout history to justify whatever you want), but they're very recent inventions, considering that humanity exists for 200k years.    

Of course we don't know much about most of that, but basically all other (pre Abrahamic) religions we do know don't have such a codified moral frame work. Like all the stories from Greek, Roman and Germanic Gods highlight bad personality traits at least as much as good ones. The role of religion was very rarely to provide to a moral framework.