The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the … - Jonathan Haidt

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Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.

Jonathan Haidt

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Divided, Mind, People, Politics, Religion And Politics, Righteous

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

Contentment, Effects, Success, Suppose, Sympathy, Trust

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion. ' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.

America, Glorify, Hero, Heroes, Jesus, Perform

We scientists have way too much a tendency to simplify problems. I guess it actually comes to us naturally. Take the simplest unit, separate out all the confusing, external factors. Study it. Make sure you understand it. And in psychology that means the person studying the individual. But if you want to study our social nature, if you want to study processes that will lead to war and peace, you don't learn all that much by looking at the single individual. A lot of the important things are emergent facts about us, things that you can only see when you get a lot of us interacting.

Mean, Psychology, Understand, War, Way

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

Brain, Depends, Emotional, Human, Sophisticated, Work