Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think it’s an open question as to how much religion there is in Japan. Certainly, when you ask people, people think religion means the Christian God and people say no to that question. But then if you start talking about other kinds of beings and spirits and agents, people get a little bit softer . . . Sure, quite a bit softer perhaps. Something else I find interesting in your work — there’s the sense of how firmly we can believe in some god or gods, and how hard it is to get us to believe in others. Very few people today believe in Zeus, or if they do it might be a kind of joke or affectation. And this splitting our intuitions between these very firm loyalties and these very loose loyalties. Now there’s some societies, I think Haiti in the Caribbean would be an example, where that seems much more fluid. You can talk people into new gods at times. It’s not easy, but it’s probably easier there than here. What accounts for that across societies, the ease of believing in additional gods? I think the standard way from looking at religions all around the world is that most people accepted that their tribe or their clan or their group had a god and naturally that meant that other people’s tribes or groups had a god, so there were lots of gods and you dealt with your god and they had their god.…

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