Moral Psychology, religion and atheism

An article by Jonathan Haidt summarises briefly where moral psychology is up to and he gives his own overview thus [and the third one is most pertinent to my own research interest on human groups as emergent entities].
"I recently summarized this new synthesis in moral psychology with four principles: 1) Intuitive primacy but not dictatorship.... 2) Moral thinking is for social doing. ... reason is the servant of the passions. ... 3) Morality binds and builds.This is the idea stated most forcefully by Emile Durkheim that morality is a set of constraints that binds people together into an emergent collective entity. ... 4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness. ... I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label as ingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), and purity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others."
It's not a short article, so I won't quote huge chunks of it. It is clearly a matter that Christians need to be taking note of and assimilating into our own thinking about morality, ethics, apologetics, education, social thinking and so forth. You'll have to read the whole thing to get more detail. My hope is that I've quoted enought to give you an idea whether this is something you should follow up in more detail. The interesting thing is that Haidt then goes on to apply his insights to the 'religous wars' that are getting underway, apparently, between secular liberals and conservatives religious people. One of the ways he does this is to make a soft implication that atheism, because it is less 'natural' to humans is more rational and less driven by post-hoc justifications ["I will also take it for granted that religious fundamentalists, and most of those who argue for the existence of God, illustrate the first three principles of moral psychology (intuitive primacy, post-hoc reasoning guided by utility, and a strong sense of belonging to a group bound together by shared moral commitments)."]. I think that this is a different kind of tack to Dawkins et al for whom religiosity is tacked on to human thinking. Haidt seems to recognise it as more fundamental. However, he does recognise this may impose a higher standard for non-religious argumentation and says of Dawkins et al, "the presence of passions should alert us that the authors, being human, are likely to have great difficulty searching for and then fairly evaluating evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings about religion. ... To my mind an irony of Dawkins' position is that he reveals a kind of religious orthodoxy in his absolute rejection of group selection."

The conclusion to the article is also very interesting: "My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages "brights" to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process."

Edge 222: