Cohesion Quotes

“The fragmentation of our awareness may trigger dizzying vertigo in the chaos of our living. As such, an overwhelming flurry of connectivity and images generate thereby an oversaturation in our brain and the overabundance makes us anxious, fractured and insecure. This might, in turn, actuate us to cut the wire with the world and stumble into an estranging and contentious cocoon of self-absorption, while off-loading the lush supply of social interaction. Life becomes, then, an intricate maneuvering ground for walking a fine line between sound connectedness and crumbling consciousness, between unflinching cohesion and atomizing fragmentation. ("Give me more images")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Long ago, our ancestors realized that the natural world was not the only wellspring of resources essential to our survival. The mind was just as rich. Humans possess a wealth of psychological resources necessary for survival: empathy, loyalty, commitment, and goodwill. Just as material resources must be processed and managed, so too with psychological resources.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“Fear may blind us to the fact that individual survival often depends on working with others.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“The ubiquitous singing, chanting, and dancing of traditional societies laid the requisite groundwork from which civilization and modernity sprouted. Take that away and Homo Sapiens are thoroughly ordinary primates - upright chimpanzees, nothing more.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychologiacl resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychological resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“So confident are we in ritual's power that we dare brandish it against the might of Nature herself. Nature will have its way with us, but we have always used ritual to rob it of the last word. It is nature that determines when a baby is born. But it has always been ritual that decides when a child's body has taken adult form. But it has always been ritual that decides when the boy is recognized as a man or the girl has become a woman. Nature directs our lusts and desires, but it has always been ritual that decides who our legitimate partner is. And in the end, nature snuffs the life from the body. But it has always been ritual that determines when our beloved is dismissed from our care. Humans are the only species that take offense at Nature's indifference to our plight. Ritual is a defiant gesture expressing that offence. If we abandon ritual do we give up something of our humanity? No. It is much simpler than that. If we abandon ritual, we give up being human.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“The -natural- world included the -supernatural-, and religion (as we call it today) was simply the means by which that part of the social world was made accessible.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“People often find religion after grave personal suffering or tragedy. It was no different with our ancestors. The few humans who managed to survive this disaster did so by finding unprecedented ways to expand social cooperation.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religious ritual was essential to establishing and maintaining never-before-seen levels of social complexity. Furthermore, ritual behavior was the very mechanism by which we acquired our uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought. Thus, religious ritual made us human.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The wealth of social rituals present among our primate cousins indicates that our hominin ancestors were preadapted for using ritual as a means of social bonding and could call upon a rich repertoire of them in their everyday lives.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religion is complicated- the emphasis here being on the verb -is-. Religion as we see it today is the product of many millennia of evolutionary history. Neither the Olympian pantheon nor the Roman magisterium was part of religion in our ancestral world. To understand religion as a cultural adaptation, we must understand what it was when it first emerged, and what kind of world it was born into.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Humans are designed not with a specific adaptive religious module, but instead with a mind prepared to engage in the myriad social/emotional/cognitive activities that fall under what we call -religion-.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Throughout human evolution, successful religious systems have provided a mechanism for resolving collective action problems by engendering social cooperation, reducing in-group reactive aggression, and optimizing out-group proactive aggression.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“Religion facilitates terrorists' goals by providing moral legitimacy to their cause, as well.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“All contemporary world religions impose a moral framework upon their adherents, thereby enabling terrorists to present their conflicts in morally absolute dichotomies, such as good versus bad or righteous versus evil. While legitimizing one's own cause, religions are particularly effective at demonizing those with opposing views. The history of religion is replete with examples in which in-group passions are aroused and out-group hatreds are dangerously ingnited.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“The use of religion to transform local power struggles into cosmic conflicts benefits terrorist groups who may otherwise be viewed as economically and politically self-serving.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“Just as violence constitutes a very effective proximate mechanism of religion; religion serves as an excellent proximate mechanism for violence, as well.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“Terrorist training camps effectively employ fear, violence, and pain in rituals reminiscent of costly adolescent rites of passage.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“The ability of ritual to evoke both positive and negative affect is, of course, not specific to religion. Secular dances, concerts, and -raves- induce feelings of happiness and joy, and military boot camp elicits pain, shock, and awe. Such secular experiences have strong emotional impacts on participants also, particularly during adolescence.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“The scaling up of human social organization into mega-groups comprising millions (even hundreds of millions in modern nation states) would not have been possible without the human facility for culture acquisition and transmission on a massive scale.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Nevertheless, my contention is precisely that Homo sapiens sapiens possesses an innate, omnipresent, evolution-shaped predisposition for ordering its world, which among other things extends to form the foundation of mythology, metaphysics, and science. As with all other adaptive predispositions, this human propensity to construct interpretative mental frameworks of the world expresses itself as a powerful urge, a profound emotional need, which humans simply cannot help or do without. We are compulsive meaning seekers. It is this propensity -intertwined as it is with the evolution of symbolic representation and generalized conceptual thought- that is responsible for our species' remarkable career.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“If a religious community lacks cohesion, it will lose members. But other problems—from isolation to aggression—arise when a religious community is too cohesive, when it is so tightly bound there is no space for adhesive forces to form ties with the wider culture and members of other communities. When inward-looking groups face outward with fear or fury, they can become, to coin a term, dehisive, a bond-breaking social force. The history of religion provides myriad examples of volatile religious movements that overemphasized in-group solidarity and escalated tensions with outsiders.”
― Thomas A Tweed, Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Belief in the supernatural is another powerful route to overcoming the very natural desire to stay alive.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Si el objeto de usar drogas en fiestas religiosas es facilitar el acercamiento a lo sobrenatural, el de nuestras fiestas profanas es sin duda aumentar el grado de unión entre los participantes, potenciando la cordialidad.”
― Antonio Escohotado, Historia general de las drogas

“If personal identity resides in the telling, then so does social identity. Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology) know who they are by the stories they tell. The modern discipline of history is closely related to the emergence of the nation-state.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together.”
― Ray Charles, Brother Ray: Ray Charles' Own Story

“Sports are not exactly spiritual, but playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations. Research consistently shows that teen who play team sports are happier than those who don’t. humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“The simple act of eating together, especially from the same plate or serving dish, strengthens that bond and reduces the likelihood of conflict. This is one deficiency the virtual world can never overcome, no matter how good VR gets.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness