On the religious Right and religious people in general have the feeling that the world is not just material, the world is not just there for us to do what we want with. That our bodies, things have an immaterial essence, a spiritual essence that God is in all of us.
The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.
I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts.
People can believe pretty much whatever they want to believe about moral and political issues, as long as some other people near them believe it, so you have to focus on indirect methods to change what people want to believe.
When I began my work on how morality varies across the political spectrum, there was a partisan, manipulative element to it. I wanted to help the Democrats win.
Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.
Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.
Democrats talk about programs like Social Security or Medicare, but it's not clear to most voters what Democrats' core moral values are.
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.
Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family, and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the Left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children.
Politics is really religion. Politics is about sacredness. Politics is about offering a vision that will bind the nation together to pursue greatness.
While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
