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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"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.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Perhaps "supernatural" beliefs are a space/energy saving mental placeholder for awareness of the higher-order requirements of social complexity.

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/wik...

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.

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