Book Musings: The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Reflections on the book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. (Don’t be frightened by the word Righteous in the title: this is not about religion!) I just finished a book that is now on my top 5 books of all time list. Maybe top 3. (Time will tell.) In my wildest fantasy, I would strap every human into a chair, pull their eyelids open with a terrifying machine and force to them read it. This book basically reinforces with (what I find to be) very good arguments, a message that I’ve been trying to articulate and spread for a long time. It has to do with how we relate to those with radically different worldviews, politics, religions (or lack thereof), etc. Like many in my generation and after, I’m a child of two ideological worlds. I was raised in a conservative, evangelical Christian subculture. Most of my world revolved around a church of people with with a very homogenous worldview. Everybody read the same evangelical Christian books, listened to the same evange