Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.
I don't like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We're human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.
I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.
Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger.
We've got to find ways of confronting the issues that divide - and at the heart of cultural issues, you often find religions.
It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies. What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often.
Religion is often just tribalism: pride in a group one was born into, a group that is often believed to have 'God' on its side.
In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.