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Religion: More Money, More Morals
Abstract
Between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, religions worldwide underwent a dramatic shift, emphasizing morality and asceticism for the first time. A new study suggests that the emergence of this new type of religion can be explained by increases in prosperity.
This research is based on a gap in authority between men and women in making investment decisions where women are considered less financially literate and less struggling. Therefore, this study examines how financial literacy and trust affect women’s investment decisions in Sharia instruments with financial spirituality orientation as a moderating factor. The sample was selected from 256 women on the northeastern coast of Central Java, Indonesia. Structural Equation Modeling with a Partial Least Square method was used to test the data. The findings showed that the higher the financial literacy, trust, and financial spirituality orientation, the better the decision level in the Sharia investment decisions. The financial spirituality orientation strengthens the influence of financial literacy on Sharia investment decisions. However, financial spiritual orientation cannot intervene in trust in financial institutions. This finding suggests that women consider their spiritual beliefs while making financial decisions, but spirituality cannot nullify trust’s ability to affect Sharia investment choices. The implication is that when gender equality is acknowledged, women can get an education, work, income, and be more financially literate. The role of financial spirituality is in its mission of establishing the life-balances.
This paper analyses the Sikh religious tradition in light of research on the connections between religion, morality, and economics. Sikhism provides a compact and well-documented example of the creation and evolution of a religious community, in which moral guidance is paramount, but interacts with material incentives and material conditions. The time scale of this case, and its geographic and conceptual location in juxtaposition to Hinduism and Islam, make Sikh tradition a useful additional data point for analyses of the relationship of religion, morality, and economics. At the same time, considering the Sikh tradition in these more general conceptual frameworks provides a clearer understanding of this specific case.
Between roughly 500 BCE and 300 BCE, three distinct regions, the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ganges Valley, saw the emergence of highly similar religious traditions with an unprecedented emphasis on self-discipline and asceticism and with "otherworldly," often moralizing, doctrines, including Buddhism, Jainism, Brahmanism, Daoism, Second Temple Judaism, and Stoicism, with later offshoots, such as Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. This cultural convergence, often called the "Axial Age," presents a puzzle: why did this emerge at the same time as distinct moralizing religions, with highly similar features in different civilizations? The puzzle may be solved by quantitative historical evidence that demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (a proxy for general prosperity) just before the Axial Age in these three regions.
Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age.
We discussed several possible causal pathways, including the development of literacy and urban life, and put forward the idea, inspired by life history theory, that absolute affluence would have impacted human motivation and reward systems, nudging people away from short-term strategies (resource acquisition and coercive interactions) and promoting long-term strategies (self-control techniques and cooperative interactions).
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Significance
Here we show that the spatial prevalence of human societies that believe in moralizing high gods can be predicted with a high level of accuracy (91%) from historical, social, and ecological data. Using high-resolution datasets, we systematically estimate the relative effects of resource abundance, ecological risk, cultural diffusion, shared ancestry, and political complexity on the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods. The methods presented in this paper provide a blueprint for how to leverage the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.
omething extraordinary happened on the evolutionary path that gave rise to creatures capable of culture. The changes are so profound it is as if we humans were somehow domesticated. levels of violence are drastically lower than for the other great apes. We are born helpless, we require extended care, and we actively teach each other. We pay exquisite attention to each other’s wishes and emotional states. We not only cooperate in ways other great apes can--tic behaviors obviously harmful to fitness. even our bones are different from our ancestors in ways typical of a domesticated species (leach, 2003).domestication does not require planning. Self-interested behaviors are suffi-cient. Chasing away aggressive wolves allows friendly ones to gain an advantage by scavenging scraps. after only a thousand generations, this has transformed wolves into the prosocial, loyal, and helpful dogs we now love. Of course, humans were not domesticated by choices made by some other species. nonetheless, many human social characteristics would be easy to understand if we had somehow been domes-ticated. aspects of culture now select for prosociality and capacities for complex social cognition. But what happened before there was culture? What got the pro-cess going?We are understandably curious about what happened on our evolutionary path that made us capable of culture. The sequence likely involved so many interacting factors and recursive causal cycles that any description that satisfies our evolved minds will inevitably oversimplify the actual process. nonetheless, as illustrated by the chapters in this book, an enormous amount of thought and research has advanced our understanding of how selection shaped capacities for culture. Old arguments pitting evolution and culture as alternatives have been replaced by formulations that recognize both as essential to any full explanation of human
Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new religions is their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, according to which one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself). Cognitive science models that account for many properties of religion can be extended to these religions. Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that proportionality-based morality is highly intuitive to human beings. The cultural success of moralizing movements, secular or religious, could be explained based on proportionality.
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit
other people. Although sociological surveys reveal an association between self-reports of religiosity and prosociality, experiments
measuring religiosity and actual prosocial behavior suggest that this association emerges primarily in contexts where reputational
concerns are heightened. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior
among anonymous strangers. Experiments demonstrate an association between apparent profession of religious devotion and greater
trust. Cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the cultural presence of morally concerned deities and large
group size in humans. We synthesize converging evidence from various fields for religious prosociality, address its specific
boundary conditions, and point to unresolved questions and novel predictions.
How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today--even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods"--the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths--spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other. Once human minds could conceive of supernatural beings, Norenzayan argues, the stage was set for rapid cultural and historical changes that eventually led to large societies with Big Gods--powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating the moral behavior of humans. How? As the saying goes, "watched people are nice people." It follows that people play nice when they think Big Gods are watching them, even when no one else is. Yet at the same time that sincere faith in Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, it also introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. In some parts of the world, such as northern Europe, secular institutions have precipitated religion's decline by usurping its community-building functions. These societies with atheist majorities--some of the most cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous in the world--climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. So while Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions, it also helps us understand another, more recent social transition--the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
In the last thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century. Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits--energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity--and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years--from about 550 to 1750 CE--when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead. Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history, The Measure of Civilization puts forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.
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