Joshua Greene

And it's kind of explaining the unexplainable.

And then there was this kind of transition.

And the story I'm telling here, I should say, comes from sort of brilliant analyses by researchers like Ara Norenzayan and Joe Henrich and others.

So this is not just coming from me.

there was this kind of invention of big gods, right?

And what they mean by big gods is gods that know everything about what people do and what they're really thinking and why they do it and care that humans treat each other well.

And what that combination does is it provides a kind of guarantee of cooperation because if I'm a Muslim and you're a Muslim, even if we've never met before, if we both know that we are, you know, faithful,

then I know that I can trust you and you can trust me because we both know what'll happen to us if we disappoint God in the way that we behave.

And so religion has been a way to scale up cooperation and build trust

Among strangers, right?

And this had an enormous effect on people's ability to trade with other people and exchange technology.

So it is a social technology, right?

And what religions do, it's a double-edged sword.

It makes people more cooperative within the group.

But the religion is out there competing for resources and souls or whatever it is with other groups that are either religious or not.

And so...

Religion can bind people together, but it can also divide people at the level of groups.

Now, there are some religions that have tried to move towards a more universalist perspective, the most sort of straightforwardly so being the Unitarian Universalist Movement, which to a lot of people doesn't even feel like a, quote, real religion because it doesn't have that kind of strong sort of metaphysics and ussiness of other religions, right?

So religion is, I think, fundamentally about cooperation.

within its scope, which can be either very narrow or fairly big, and in some cases, even cover the whole world.