{"id":2148,"date":"2009-06-11T20:17:59","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T04:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2148"},"modified":"2009-06-11T20:17:59","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T04:17:59","slug":"religion-nationality-trust-of-the-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/religion-nationality-trust-of-the-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion, nationality &#038; trust of the Other"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/rsquaretrustgif-734941.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: 0px initial initial;\" title=\"rsquaretrustgif-734941\" src=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/rsquaretrustgif-734941-300x156.png\" alt=\"rsquaretrustgif-734941\" width=\"300\" height=\"156\" align=\"left\" \/><\/a>At <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/religious-national-trust.php\">Gene Expression I have a post<\/a> up where I explore the relationship between lack of trust of other religions and other nationalities across nations. As many might expect, the relationship was close. On the other hand, there was no relationship between the self-reported importance of religion within nations and their distrust of other religions.<\/p>\n<p>What does this tell us? Some theorists, such as David Sloan Wilson, argue that religion has functional role in generating group cohesion, following in the wake of the theories of Emile Durkheim. One indicator of ingroup cohesion is distrust of outgroups. Human propensities tend to exhbit this sort of zero-sum dynamic because like all animals our past was Malthusian; the pie was fixed, how we sliced it up was the issue at hand. These data suggest that though religion may foster ingroup cohesion, and there are many historical examples of this occurring, and the sociological data is highly suggestive in this direction, it is also not necesary or sufficient to have intense religiosity to achieve this. This explains the paradox of Japan. Of course we may modulate our definition of religion to include the generally agnostic Japanese as a religious people, but semantic expansion tends to result in true but trivial assertions.<\/p>\n<p>This goes back to the point that correlations within nations may not be as informative as we would assume without prior knowledge between nations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Gene Expression I have a post up where I explore the relationship between lack of trust of other religions and other nationalities across nations. As many might expect, the relationship was close. On the other hand, there was no &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/religion-nationality-trust-of-the-other\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2150,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148\/revisions\/2150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}