“Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year”

Your definition of “social cohesion” seems to be potentially loaded. To me, social cohesion is generally a good thing. It means cooperation, perhaps goodwill.

But the study isn’t measuring cooperation, it’s measuring duration, so it’s neutral toward whether a commune’s continued existence is better or worse for its members.

Using this measure, there was a whole lot of “social cohesion” in Alcatraz or the Tower of London or a Siberian prison camp.

One of the central strategies of a “successful” religious group is to make its members fearful of leaving (or of even considering leaving). This makes for a group that might endure, but I wouldn’t call it cohesive, and it’s certainly not something for which skeptics should strive.

In other words: while the human mind is capable of comprehending the true origin and necessity of moral behavior, doing so requires high-level and relatively deep philosophical thought. Perhaps supernatural beliefs are a sort of mental shorthand for that; a kind of energy saving or data compression adaptation.

If there is a genetic basis to religiosity or supernatural belief, it could be an example of the Baldwin effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect

Perhaps some early humans learned to cooperate, and that learning was then “genetically encoded” by evolution into a neurological shorthand for cooperative morality that we call God.

Not sure that is accurate. The article states “Ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community – what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified”. If the secular groups realize that the ritual constraint is needed because belief in it leads to social cohesion, then it could be effective.

Instead of ritual to please a god, have ritual to strengthen social groups.

Maybe, but at what price?

People generally don’t like surveillance, but nobody complains about God watching them. There seems to be a qualitative and fundamental psychological difference in how we perceive the two systems.

It does seem that they are focusing on group explanations, which as the article notes is odd because group selection is generally disparaged as a significant mechanism in evolutionary biology. Now you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, maybe some group selection mechanisms are important, but still for a phenomenon as widespread and universal as religion, one would hope for a stronger foundation than group selection.

Robin has this theory that people are altruistic with respect to health issues because it indirectly and somewhat subtly redounds to the benefit of the person showing concern, via alliance effects. Health altruism is pretty strong and widespread, perhaps not as much so as religion but close. They do mention near the end a possible explanation for religion that has something of the same flavor.

I wonder: could ubiquitous surveillance also build social cohesion?
That reminds me of something.

Razib on buddhism.

Dealing with this specific point, in the Chinese and Vietnamese traditions of Buddhism, the Bodhisattvas worship is more like Hindu Deva worship than even the worship of Roman Catholic saints, in a higher intensity in the focus on the supernatural aspects and powers.

This is a very western view of Buddhism. Buddhism is not monolithic, as Christianity is not monolithic.

The Buddhist tradition that I am most familiar with, Vietnamese Buddhism, supernatural entities are believed to exist, hauntings are believed to exist, and it is all found to be quite compatible with Buddhism.

There is no reason to believe any two active Buddhist chosen from the world would be any less different than a Quaker Universalist and a Southern Baptist.

I don’t have personal knowledge, but I have a hard time believing that Taoists are less diverse (granting that active Taoists may be less numerous).