What is religion? The video below features a short excerpt and animated discussion involving Sam Harris and Rabbi David Wolp. It's both serious and entertaining. The Rabbi calls religion "the path to God," then elaborates, before Harris begins his cross-examination. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjhbccXIp4c[/youtube] Contrast the Rabbi's definition to that of Jonathan Haidt's…
Chris Matthews is now driving the point home: Sarah Palin is a pathological liar. She fully supported the bridge to nowhere, but here she is, seven times, claiming she didn't support it. BTW, Sarah Palin claims to be quite religious. See her performance at her church here. She believes in…
At Salon.com, Sarah Posner writes about the religious beliefs of Sarah Palin. It's everything most of us would have expected. Here are a few exerpts: With regard to creation, the Assemblies of God's official position is that "even though the Bible is not primarily a book of science, it is…
For the past few years, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has successfully injected a huge does of psychology into the study of morality. Along the way, he has gone a long way toward bridging the “is” with the “ought,” a chasm that many philosophers have insisted to be unbridgeable. Haidt explores these moral-psychological issues in highly readable form in his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Here’s a photo of my personal well-worn copy of Haidt’s book:
Based on his experiments, Haidt has been extraordinarily successful in describing the moral differences distinguishing conservatives and liberals. Which group is more moral? That isn’t the right question, according to Haidt. Both of these groups sincerely strive to be “moral.” Conservatives and liberals differ in the way they characterize morality because they base their differing moral senses on different measures. Based on Haidt’s research, there are the five separate measures (I think of them as tectonic plates) that underlie all moral systems. Conservative morality substantially draws on all five of these five measures:
– harm/care
– fairness/reciprocity
– ingroup/loyalty
– authority/respect, and
– purity/sanctity
For liberals, however, the moral domain consists primarily (or only) of the first two of these five measures (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). For liberals, the other three measures (I’ll call them “conservative measures”) tend to fly under the liberal radar. In fact, many liberals scoff at claims that the conservative measures (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity) have anything at all to do with morality. To avoid a …
I've written previously about that penchant of many conservatives to base their moral sense on visceral disgust. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated, this connection is much more readily made by conservatives than by progressives (also, see here). It is in that context that I must confess that I felt…
