Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Religious Beliefs

From TED:

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer.

Jonathan Haidt studies how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and open-minded.

A small sample of related Situationist posts:

• Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning
• Jonathan Haidt Changes His Situation
• The Situation of Morality
• Jonathan Haidt – 5 Moral Values Behind Political Choices
• Haidt on “The Righteous Mind”
• The Interior Situation of Belief in God
• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• God’s Situational Effects
• Atheism-ism
• The Fundamental(ist) Attribution Error
• With God on Our Side . . .
• The Situation of Political and Religious Beliefs?
• The Stressful Situation of Religious Zealotry
• Holier Than Thou
• Think Progress or Die
  
• The Situation of Faith in God or Science
• Group Influence
• 25 Mil­lion Years of Us vs. Them
• The Situational Effect of Groups
• Racism Meets Groupism and Teamism
• ‘Us’ and ‘Them‘
• Four Failures of Deliberating Groups – Abstract
• Team-Interested Decision Making
• Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part I
• March Madness
• The ‘Turban Effect’,”
• Terror, Intergroup Violence, and the Law