Saturday, February 20, 2016

Religion and the secular left

"My hope is that the analysis presented here may help us better understand one of the crucial paradoxes of the contemporary world. This is the question of why the decline of radical left wing secular movements is so often accompanied by the flourishing of religious movements that can be harnessed by extreme right wing forces." says Alpa Shaw in Religion and the secular left: Subaltern studies Birsa Munda and the Maists Apprently Birsa Munda story will come out in a new book by Synil Khilnani.
Report on a recent paper 'Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality' (behind a firewall) in Washington Post and a discussion by Razib Khan who quotes from the paper "Our results support the hypothesis that beliefs in moralistic, punitive and knowing gods increase impartial behaviour towards distant co-religionists, and therefore can contribute to the expansion of prosociality."

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