Peace through God

"The human species is clan-oriented. We are exceedingly concerned with who is a member of our clan or a competing clan. Democrat or Republican? Windows or Linux? It’s almost impossible for us to ignore clan passions. We are also hopelessly obsessed with the hierarchy within our clan. Listen to teenagers, or anyone else, talk about who ranks to date whom, or who deserves scorn. We care immensely about tiny differentiations in status. Gossip grabs our attention, no matter how banal it is.

................Religion placed immortal supernatural beings at the top of the clan, thereby reducing everyday violence between adherents. Crusades, jihads, and bloody schisms were the price paid for this improvement, though in the grim context of human behavioral history, that was probably a bargain.

The idea of God (or gods) also served in ancient times as a way to apply the clan-centric cognition of the human species to the problem of comprehending the dynamics of the world. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, God is the “King of the universe,” so God served at least two duties: as clan leader and as explanation of reality. Thus when scientists tell believers they’re flat-out wrong, we think we’re making a point about nature, but I think we’re often heard as giving the primal message, “We elite persons reject your clan status.”

A more recent violence-avoiding arrangement, which has a promising track record so far, is for a society to support so many overlapping, ambiguous clan hierarchies that clannish perception becomes confused. This is what democratic capitalism achieves."

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Peace through God