It turns out that only the evangelicals, but not the overall public, increase church going each recession. ON THE campaign trail, Barack Obama famously claimed that blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania clung to religion because of bitterness over lost jobs. Americans are now truly fearful, as unemployment has mounted and house prices fallen. Yet the theory [...]

From Secular Planet Whenever I hear Jesus referred to as loving or merciful, I wince. While the gospels do contain some benevolent teachings, these are completely overshadowed by Jesus’ recurrent threat of unending torture for anyone who fails to accept his message. One cannot expect praise for preaching love while simultaneously executing divine blackmail. An [...]

our remaining option is to study cognitively what factors are at play in religious participation—community building, personal and communal ritual, moral teaching, literary delight, artistic expression, sensual appeal, deep meditation, metaphysical imagination, historical connection, etc.—and we start systematically reforming the broader culture to meet more of these needs (so the government does not step in and try to exploit them and so that people unmoored from these things do not lose all direction in life or feeling of communal attachment).

In other words, we can figure out how religion uses these various good things to make many happy and virtuous, while figuring out outlets for people to have these benefits without the cost of cultivating their worst intellectual tendencies towards pre-Enligtenment habits of thought and without promoting the nasty streaks of ethical authoritarianism that come with characteristically religious forms of irrationality.