HJ's critical reflection | Do politics and religion only bring about differentiation and conflict?

If you open a history textbook, you can find that large-scale conflicts are always inseparable from politics and religion.

For example, the Crusades and the Thirty Years' War because of religion, and of course the two world wars because of politics, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of religion and politics.

The Middle East, currently considered one of the most dangerous places in the world, is also constantly confronted with political and religious conflicts. If we look back at Taiwan, serious political confrontations are always emerging .

Moral psychologists believe that if we want to resolve political and religious conflicts based on differences in values, we first need to clarify how basic moral values are constructed and what people rely on to judge right and wrong.

They put forward six indicators on the basis of value judgment, namely freedom, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and holiness, and designed a questionnaire to investigate how much people value these values.

They found that people can be roughly divided into two opposing positions based on the difference in moral judgment, and the two sides have a huge difference in moral values because of the different ranking of the values of the six indicators . In order to achieve the objectivity of the experiment, the researchers constantly changed the questions and question types, and found that no matter how they changed, the results were always quite similar.

For example, Americans who support the Democratic Party will pay more attention to care, freedom and fairness, and care less about other values. In contrast, most Republican supporters believe that these six values have no obvious order and must be considered in order to maintain the inherent value system. .

The details of this discourse structure can be seen in the two articles I have written, discussing the book " Good People Always Think About Itself " .

Political or religious communities with different positions have huge differences in their moral judgments, seemingly deep-rooted differences. Is there really no possibility of cooperation? American psychologist Muzafer Sherif has demonstrated through experiments that in order to solve a common crisis, groups with different positions are likely to let go of their antagonisms and conflicts, and then work together to solve the challenges that arise in front of them .

In the experiment, 21 11-year-old boys were taken to a camp and divided into two teams, unaware that it was an experiment or that another group existed. They got acquainted with each other in the activities, divided the work independently according to the director, and named their team,

One group is called the Diamondbacks and the other is called the Eagles. The designers let the two teams know of each other's existence and designed games to compete with each other. After learning of the existence of the other team, both teams became more institutionalized, hierarchical, and more active in their activities .

In the end, the experimental designers deliberately created a common threat: the water system shared by both teams was destroyed.

Faced with such a situation, the two teams finally put aside their confrontation and worked together to solve the problem. During the activity, no one taught the children what to do, but they were able to deal with the crisis spontaneously through politics, which is considered by psychologists as a human instinct .

In this experiment, we can see two political alliances. First, for the first time, when two teams learn of each other's existence, they take on the other team in a more institutionalized, hierarchical way.

In the second alliance, when the two teams faced damage to the water supply system, they temporarily put down their confrontation. In other words, "politics" should not be a viper and beast, but instead has the opportunity to promote people's cooperation .

In additional research, we can also see that religion does not always have to be a cause for strife .

First, behavioral economist Uri Gneezy found that compared with non-religious people, religious believers can effectively suppress deceitful behavior and increase trust.

American scholar Stephen Monsma judged the statistics of religious piety through the frequency of going to church, and found that the top 1/5 of the faith status are willing to donate 7% of their income to charities . In the same study, the donors and the organizations that donated were often of the same beliefs, which the researchers believe shows that religion has a cohesive and internal role.

From this point of view, one cannot deny the benefits of being religious, nor can it become taboo to talk simply because one sees only the downsides. In the study of politics and religion, we can see its historical importance .

However, it is true that we cannot overturn a boat of people with one pole. Only seeing the actions of the radicals, we ignore the possibility of mutual understanding because of choking . For example, when Christians are often stopped to preach on the street, it is assumed that Christians all over the world are like this .

Today, the situation of ethnic confrontation is becoming more and more serious. Political or religious groups with different positions maliciously attack each other and lack mutual understanding and communication. Living in a diverse society, we should pay attention to more "common crises", such as the gap between the rich and the poor, climate change and other important issues.

Try to see the positive impact of political and religious communities, and for example, the social welfare efforts made by Christian churches for disadvantaged groups. Political and religious communities with different positions, even if they have different views on these issues , can try to dialogue and understand the positions of both sides in order to pursue a deeper understanding .

Try to open up and talk to people who have different positions!

Finally, the inspiration for writing this article is attached...