Moralizing religion emerged recently as a rare cultural innovation

Evidence

In this chapter, I argue that this connection between morality and religion, taken for granted in modern world religions, has in fact emerged culturally over human history, probably rather recently. If true, this should be a startling fact that begs for an explanation. As I emphasized in chapter 1, we now live in a world where the vast majority of human beings are the cultural descendants of Big Gods. If modern hunter-gatherer groups clue us to the ancestral conditions, even in a limited and oblique fashion, then we can conclude that these beliefs started as rare forms of cultural beliefs. If so, then how did we get here from there? What role did this cultural change play in the growth and stabilization of large-scale cooperation? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 400

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The morality-religion link being historically recent is the necessary premise for reading Silence’s fumi-e as a historical technology of apostasy rather than a timeless religious struggle.

Related

• The religion-morality link emerged culturally and recently in history (similarity 0.94)
• As groups grow, moral enforcement and religion become intertwined. (similarity 0.81)
• As groups grow, religion acquires harder-to-fake markers that convert strangers into moral communities (similarity 0.81)
• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.80)
• Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies (similarity 0.80)
• Water-scarce societies tend to develop moralizing gods (similarity 0.80)
• Written records reveal religions evolving toward moralizing Big Gods with scale (similarity 0.80)
• Religious solidarity mechanisms extend moral concern to complete strangers (similarity 0.80)
• Moral judgments serve group cohesion, not abstract individual reasoning (similarity 0.80)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization (similarity 0.80)
• Only prosocial religions function as moral systems across history (similarity 0.80)
• The religion-morality link is a recent cultural invention, not an ancient universal (similarity 0.80)
• Gods’ moral involvement grows with group size culturally (similarity 0.80)
• Big God prosocial religions contributed to, not merely resulted from, large-scale societies (similarity 0.79)
• Early hunter-gatherer gods cared about ritual, not moral behavior. (similarity 0.79)