Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, ever

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 The first is that customs, traditions, and the like are subject to Darwinian selection. Henrich is not always clear on exactly what is being selected for—is it individuals who follow a tradition, groups whose members all follow the tradition, or the tradition itself?—but the general gist is that traditions stick around longest when they are a... See more

Yale sociologist Philip Gorski recently wrote of the “failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life . . . that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating.” He notes that there are two main theories put forward by social scientists to explain morality without recourse to religion. First there are

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