An interview with AI on religion
I put a few questions to AI. Interesting answers. This was Claude (Sonnet 4.6), (Opus 4.8 answers were not that interesting) Question: Would atheism or areligiousism lead to social contracts breakdown, personal ego confusion on a population basis? Answer: Good question — it touches philosophy, sociology, and psychology at once. Let me give it a fair treatment. The concern, steelmanned The worry has real intellectual pedigree. Durkheim argued religion provides social cohesion through shared ritual and moral consensus. Dostoevsky's formulation — "if God does not exist, everything is permitted" — captures the fear that without transcendent grounding, moral authority collapses into pure subjectivism. And psychologically, religion offers identity scaffolding: a cosmic narrative about who you are, why you're here, and what you owe others. What the evidence actually shows The empirical record doesn't support the collapse thesis: The most secular societies on Earth — ...