The core of sociology is one simple truth: individual people can be a mess to predict, but masses of people are easy. Human behavior in aggregate is subject to simple incentives and simple outcomes. Crowds can be studied with models that verge on purely physical, scarcely requiring that even biology play a role. It is not difficult to figure out what humans will do when presented with a certain set of incentives, and one of the insights that follows is that if one wants people to take a certain action, one of the most effective ways to make that happen is to make the correct thing easy.
morality
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Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist
TodayChristian.net seems to think they have a set of questions that “Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…” They’d better be very interesting to warrant that mess of capital letters and using the word “atheist” like someone who doesn’t know English very well. Let’s see what these stumpers apparently are.
1. How Did You Become an Atheist?
2. What happens when we die?
3. What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!
4. Without God, where do you get your morality from?
5. If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?
6. If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?
7. Where did the universe come from?
8. What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
9. What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?
10. If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?
Sigh. Here we go.
Magic and Morality
I had a long Facebook conversation recently with a friend-of-a-friend that I’ve been meaning to cut apart and discuss here in various topical segments. (The conversation, not the acquaintance.)
This friend-of-a-friend calls himself both libertarian and Catholic (a bizarre combination on many levels) and derives a great deal of his thinking on ethics and social issues from papal encyclicals and other Catholic writings. My conversation with him provides an opportunity, then, to examine the vital difference between religious and secular morality.
Let’s take two classic issues for “values voter” types like him: homosexuality and contraception. My acquaintance writes (emphasis mine):