Vengeful Gods make more potent moral monitors than kind Gods

Evidence

And third, and most importantly, these two types of explanations diverge about their predictions about what kinds of deities most strongly evoke prosocial tendencies. Ideomotor explanations predict that benevolent and kind Gods more clearly fit the prosocial stereotype that presumably causes greater prosocial behavior. In contrast, supernatural monitoring explanations predict that vengeful and punishing Gods make more potent supernatural monitors, and are therefore more likely to encourage nice behavior. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 159

Categorization

• XREF: Directly fuels the reader’s Silence analysis: the punishing God of Rodrigues, and why a punishing big god is the mechanism — while the ideomotor alternative would predict a kind God would drive more prosociality. Inverts the intuitive ‘benevolent God inspires goodness’ story. — connects to: Moralizing gods are a minority across documented world cultures — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 416; Hunter-gatherer gods lacked wide moral concern and omniscience — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 415; Believing God is punishing deters cheating more than believing God is kind — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 168 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the fumi-e trampling scene presume the Japanese authorities believed in the supernatural-monitoring mechanism — that degrading the object of surveillance disrupts its power?
• DEEPTHINKING: The punishing-god hypothesis overturns the intuitive benevolent-God-prosocial model and reframes which kinds of divine images actually do shoring-up work in societies — a genuinely paradigm-shifting distinction.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 159

Broader Connections

• Supernatural monitoring caused the God-prosociality association, not the reverse #expands (0.82) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 175
• Thoughts of watchful gods make people behave prosocially even when anonymous #qualifies (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 157