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Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egois...more

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Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a p...more

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Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities...more

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The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (tho...more

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The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.

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I quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral. ... Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coher...more

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Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

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Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to ...more

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Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

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Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous...more