{"id":514,"date":"2008-10-09T22:40:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2008\/10\/reasons-to-fear-humanism-conservatives-and-liberals-disagree.html"},"modified":"2014-11-13T23:10:27","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T22:10:27","slug":"reasons-to-fear-humanism-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2008\/10\/reasons-to-fear-humanism-conservatives.html","title":{"rendered":"Reasons to fear humanism: conservatives and liberals disagree"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

What if there were no gods? One major reason for adopting and maintaining religious belief is a fear of the what would happen if they were abandoned. To help understand why people maintain these beliefs, it\u2019s important to understand what these fears are. And that\u2019s exactly what a new study has done (McAdams and Albaugh, 2008).<\/p>\n

What they did was recruit 128 devout Christians from around Chicago and scored them on their political ideology. Each was asked each to construct a \u2018life narrative\u2019, and they were then asked to imagine what their lives might have been like had they not embraced the faith they have.<\/p>\n

For political conservatives, they feared that a life without faith would have been uncontrolled, with unrestrained sexual and aggressive urges, addictive behaviours, and human selfishness. In their narratives, they described:<\/p>\n

incessant conflict and chaos, expressing strong apprehension regarding people\u2019s inability to control their impulses and the attendant breakdown of social relationships and societal institutions<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Political liberals feared that without faith their life would be empty and barren, and devoid of emotional intensity. They described a world that was:<\/p>\n

barren or lifeless, lacking in color and texture, an empty wasteland that would not sustain them<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So religion caters for these two essentially antagonistic needs. This causes difficulties for religious groups, such as the Church of England, that attempt to represent all individuals in a society. But the results are not altogether surprising, given the differences in world views and psychology between conservatives and liberals. As Jonathan Haidt (psychologist at the University of Virginia) describes it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What this study underlines is that religious believers are not homogenous, and that their reasons for believing are connected to their wider beliefs about the world. To move to a world that in which faith is less prevalent, alternative political and societal mechanisms need to be found that can provide the reassurance that both conservatives an liberals need.<\/p>\n

\"ResearchBlogging.org\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

D MCADAMS, M ALBAUGH (2008). What if there were no God? Politically conservative and liberal Christians imagine their lives without faith Journal of Research in Personality<\/span> DOI: 10.1016\/j.jrp.2008.07.013<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What if there were no gods? One major reason for adopting and maintaining religious belief is a fear of the what would happen if they were abandoned. To help understand why people maintain these beliefs, it\u2019s important to understand what these fears are. And that\u2019s exactly what a new study has done (McAdams and Albaugh, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nReasons to fear humanism: conservatives and liberals disagree<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What if there were no gods? One major reason for adopting and maintaining religious belief is a fear of the what would happen if they were abandoned. To\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2008\/10\/reasons-to-fear-humanism-conservatives.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reasons to fear humanism: conservatives and liberals disagree\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What if there were no gods? One major reason for adopting and maintaining religious belief is a fear of the what would happen if they were abandoned. 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