Religion = team sport, Doctrine = team colors

[Tator]

I recently read a fabulous book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the role evolution may have played in the development of religion, and why religion persists.

There are many points in the book I'd like to discuss, but haven't had time to do so. However, there is one I can briefly summarize, that I think touches upon why many exmormons get frustrated with believers who know the controversial facts but continue to believe.

Religion is a team sport. It's all about building a community, a tribe of people devoted to one another, willing to sacrifice for one another, and imbued with a system to discourage free-riders. It's not a perfect system, but it has been a system that has enabled the members of the team to thrive in a way that isolated human beings could not.

Doctrine is simply team colors. It's a way to mark the members of the team. The specific colors (doctrine) aren't what really matters. What matters is that you're wearing the right colors, that mark you as a member of your team.

People who leave the church, for some reason, are able to consider the possibility of life outside the team. I think there are many reasons for the ability to make such a consideration, which is too threatening for others to even consider. Once they consider the possibility of life outside the team, they are willing to look critically at the colors (doctrine), and reject the team on the basis of the illogical and unsupportable claims of the team (religion). And all religions make illogical and unsupportable claims. It's what makes the arbitrary quality of the demands and rules acceptable. Faith. But those who are still on the team, and cannot deal with the aspect of life outside the team, simply cannot look critically at the colors.

As Haidt says, morality binds and blinds. Whatever the moral code is, it binds people together. It also blinds them to the often arbitrary nature of their sacred values.

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. (page 311)

Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has the right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation. Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice. (page 257)

This is why we can have the same arguments, debates, discussions, with believers until the cows come home, and if the believer isn't able, for whatever reason, to consider life outside the team and thereby to actually question the chosen colors, it won't make one bit of difference in the end.

[_Morley]

Thanks for this, Beastie.

Note that this is also a lens in which to view patriotism, such as the belief in 'American exceptionalism.'

[_beastie]

Thanks for this, Beastie.

Note that this is also a lens in which to view patriotism, such as the belief in 'American exceptionalism.'

Exactly. The book discusses both politics and religion extensively.

[_bcspace]

People who leave the church, for some reason, are able to consider the possibility of life outside the team. I think there are many reasons for the ability to make such a consideration, which is too threatening for others to even consider. Once they consider the possibility of life outside the team, they are willing to look critically at the colors (doctrine), and reject the team on the basis of the illogical and unsupportable claims of the team (religion). And all religions make illogical and unsupportable claims. It's what makes the arbitrary quality of the demands and rules acceptable. Faith. But those who are still on the team, and cannot deal with the aspect of life outside the team, simply cannot look critically at the colors.

Completely wrong based on reality. Some people who looked critically at their old team are unable to look critically at their new team. Others have looked critically at multiple teams and have selected a team based on the critical analysis of multiple teams. Others continue to look critically at their existing team and remain because the other teams don't pass muster.

[_Aristotle Smith]

My problem with analysis of the kind Haidt is doing, or probably more fairly your summary of what he is doing, is that it tends to discount ideas in order to set up a dichotomy. In the above the dichotomy is that religion is about community, while doctrine (ideas) is something ancillary. The idea is that people stay in a religion mostly because of community, and that ideas (doctrine) is nothing more than they jerseys people wear. I think this is simplistic, unfair, and doesn't actually reflect reality.

To be fair, I haven't read the book. But I would object in at least two ways.

Ideas do matter to people in religion and politics, it's not just about jerseys. To take one prime example of this, take a look at the Episcopal Church. It is currently in the midst of destroying itself from within, and the destruction is almost solely due to fights over doctrine. If doctrine was merely about jerseys (and we know that the Episcopal Church is probably the church that cares most about the jerseys they are wearing), this would not be happening, because protection of the community would be more important.

Secondly, different doctrine/ideas produce different communities. And those different communities will have different evolutionary advantages. Over time communities with good ideas will tend to survive, those that don't won't. Thus there is some justification for caring about and fighting for ideas, because the survival of the community is probably due to having a particular set of ideas. The impression I got from the original post is that doctrine/ideas are mostly interchangeable, much like one can swap jerseys and still play a game without consequences. If this is correct, then I think this is a serious deficiency in Haidt's analysis.

[_Drifting]

People who leave the church, for some reason, are able to consider the possibility of life outside the team. I think there are many reasons for the ability to make such a consideration, which is too threatening for others to even consider. Once they consider the possibility of life outside the team, they are willing to look critically at the colors (doctrine), and reject the team on the basis of the illogical and unsupportable claims of the team (religion). And all religions make illogical and unsupportable claims. It's what makes the arbitrary quality of the demands and rules acceptable. Faith. But those who are still on the team, and cannot deal with the aspect of life outside the team, simply cannot look critically at the colors.

Completely wrong based on reality. Some people who looked critically at their old team are unable to look critically at their new team. Others have looked critically at multiple teams and have selected a team based on the critical analysis of multiple teams. Others continue to look critically at their existing team and remain because the other teams don't pass muster.

Sometimes the team you support loses members in droves because your team is just rubbish and the coach doesn't have a credible game plan.

[_bcspace]

Sometimes the team you support loses members in droves because your team is just rubbish and the coach doesn't have a credible game plan.

Sure. Also, the team could be great in all areas yet suffer significant loss because members are being lured off by "greater" promises that are ultimately unkept. Thankfully, the LDS Church is in neither category.

[_beastie]

Yes, my summary over-simplified, and his book addressed the issues you all raised. Ideas do matter in that some ideas produce more successful communities, others less so.

Of course, I believe Haidt is an atheist (I can't remember off the top of my head if he explicitly stated as much, but it would be a reasonable conclusion even if he didn't), so his view is going to be fundamentally different than a theist who does believe that some religious claims are true and others are not.

His book also talks at length about moral "pillars", so to speak, and how not all human beings share the same tendency to emphasize all the pillars equally. Some people emphasize loyalty much more than "enlightenment" (the attempt to rise above personal bias in the attainment of knowledge), and those people would be far less inclined to reject the team.

bc - no one is suggesting that once you leave a team, you are magically inoculated from this phenomenon. His quote from page 311 demonstrates that clearly.

[_Kishkumen]

You'll have to excuse, bc. Most of his commentary is an internal dialogue that he shares with us as though he were responding to something we actually wrote, when it is usually just his lecture to the imaginary liberal, ex-Mormon, atheist construct in his head that he fears like the boogeyman.

[_cwald]

You'll have to excuse, bc. Most of his commentary is an internal dialogue that he shares with us as though he were responding to something we actually wrote, when it is usually just his lecture to the imaginary liberal, ex-Mormon, atheist construct in his head that he fears like the boogeyman.

Which is why I keep coming back and lurking here. It is very good entertainment.