It's an interesting way to say something that seems obvious: to the extent that humans believe they're being watched, or judged, by some sort of more powerful entity, they'll behave better.* And that has evolutionary benefit. The tendency to believe in god/gods evolved in us, for obvious reasons, and it's powerful enough that it exists, with all its internal contradictions (I'm thinking of the biblical god in particular: polytheism gets around a lot of the problems), in otherwise very critical thinkers.
DNA: all knowing, all powerful!
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* Somewhere back in the archive is a post I wrote about an experiment: in an employee lounge there was a place for free coffee, and a request for donations to cover the cost. Above the area were placed differing pictures. When it was generic, landscape, whatever, people gave donations at a much lower level than when there was a picture of two large eyes looking back. (I tried to find the post, and failed; but I did stumble upon this one, which I found re-amusing. Sometimes I crack myself up.
Everyone talks about the R's "Southern Strategy" but I believe the answer to why the south is solid red is much simpler. Go back to the 1860s
ReplyDeletewhen a Republican president, Lincoln, forced the south, at the point of a gun, to give up slavery. Shortly after, there wasn't a white
Republican to be found anywhere in the South. That remained the case for 100 years until the 1960s when a Democrat, Kennedy, forced the South,
at the point of a gun (in this case the national guards of the states in question and Federal marshalls), to give up segregation. Shortly
after, a white Democrat was almost impossible to find and it remains that way today.
CSM - just south of the middle of nowhere.