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1:47

(In »Everything is religion«)

This productive coherence exercises a powerful allure for reasons that we need not address further. We humans are social creatures who experience well-being by doing things together with others, and its contrast – alienation and isolation – is not something on which one can build dynamic and prosperous societies. This in turn means, as Haidt points out, that in the sense of being modern people, enlightened and rational, we can choose to reject organised religion, but even if we do so, we cannot emancipate ourselves just like that from the basic religious psychology that we are concerned with here. However, we can, as stated, always manipulate the terminology and imagine that religion is something other than religion, because we have decided to call it something else, if this makes us feel modern and clear-thinking.