Robert Sapolsky

When it’s two-thirty on those mornings, I always have a brain tumor. These are very useful for that sort of terror, because you can attribute every conceivable nonspecific symptom to a brain tumor and justify your panic. Perhaps you do, too; or maybe you lie there thinking that you have cancer, or an ulcer, or that you’ve just had a stroke.

hedonism is “the pursuit of pleasure,” anhedonia is “the inability to feel pleasure”

Nothing comes from nothing. No brain is an island.

being traumatized by ninth-grade

That’s because religion is arguably our most defining cultural invention, an incredibly powerful catalyst for both our best and worst behaviors.

The anxiety-reducing effects of belief are logical, given that psychological stress is about lack of control, predictability, outlets, and social support. Depending on the religion, belief brings an explanation for why things happen, a conviction that there is a purpose, and the sense of a creator who is interested in us, who is benevolent, who responds to human entreaties, who preferentially responds to entreaties from people like you. No wonder religiosity has health benefits (independent of the community support that it brings and the decreased rates of substance abuse).

Thus reminders of a judgmental god(s) boosts prosociality. It also matters what that deity does about transgressions. Within and among cultures, the more punitive the god, the more generosity to an anonymous coreligionist. Do punitive gods make for more punitive people (at least in an economic game)? In one study, no—save your cash, God’s got it covered. In another, yes—a punitive god would want me to be punitive as well. The UBC group has shown something ironic. Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence in each of belief in the existence of a heaven and hell. The greater the skew toward belief in hell, rather than heaven, the lower the national crime rate. When it comes to Eternity, sticks apparently work better than carrots.

f course, this is not a uniform effect of religion; Norenzayan distinguishes between private and communal religiosity in surveying support for suicide bombers among Palestinians.17 In a refutation of “Islam = terrorism” idiocy, people’s personal religiosity (as assessed by how often they prayed) didn’t predict support for terrorism. However, frequently attending services at a mosque did. The author then polled Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox adherents, Israeli Jews, Indonesian Muslims, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics as to whether they’d die for their religion and whether people of other religions caused the world’s troubles. In all cases frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds. This is hugely important.

It can be far more than a mere academic matter when a scientist thinks that human behavior can be entirely explained from only one perspective.

First, you can’t begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology