>
> If we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of
> right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible
> principles of action [and] a universal moral grammar, built into the
> brains of all humans; grammar is a set of principles that operate on
> the basis of the causes and consequences of action, [and the religious
> modules must be activated to some degree for moral experience to
> happen then yes, morality is somewhat connected with religion.
>
> ------------------------
>
> The mind is composed of a large number of mental modules each designed
> to solve a specific problem. For example, there is one mechanism for
> perceiving three dimensions, another for anger, another for falling in
> love. The mind is like a Swiss Army knife; i.e., it has lots of
> specialized tools. There is no such thing as general intelligence,
> general learning, or any other general ability to solve problems.
>
>
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/463evolpsyIQ.html
>
> ...we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of
> right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible
> principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar,
> built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of
> principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of
> action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language
> faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible
> languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a
> universal toolkit for building possible moral systems.
>
>
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/11/marc-hauser-mor.html
>
> Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal
> Sense of Right and Wrong - by Marc
Hauserhttp://www.amazon.com/Moral-Minds-Nature-Designed-Universal/dp/006078...
>
> If across the globe and throughout history, human beings have engaged
> in a variety of religious practices and have held a diversity of
> religious beliefs and these phenomena have been explained in a variety
> of different ways by anthropologists, psychologists, and other
> scholars, as well as by religious practitioners themselves, with
> varying degrees of success, then perhaps more puzzling, and just in
> need of an explanation, is the fact that all human beings have
> religion  in the first place.
>
> If religion is a by-product of the way our minds evolved to negotiate
> the natural and, more importantly, the social world and the
> explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the
> way all human minds work.
>
> Religious concepts activate various functionally distinct mental
> systems, present also in non-religious contexts, and ‘tweak’ the usual
> inferences of these systems. They deal with detection and
> representation of animacy and agency, social exchange, moral
> intuitions, precaution against natural hazards and understanding of
> misfortune. Each of these activates distinct neural resources or
> families of networks.
>
> The Inferential Instinct: ...a naturalistic account of cultural
> representations that describes how evolved conceptual dispositions
> make humans likely to acquire certain concepts more easily than
> others. The aggregated result of these individual acquisition
> processes channels cultures along particular paths, with the result
> that some concepts are both relatively stable within a group and
> recurrent among different groups.
>
> Our brains have been "designed by evolution" to employ particular
> cognitive systems that help us to make sense of "particular aspects of
> objects around us and produce specific kinds of inferences about
> them." There are, for instance, brain–systems in this sense that deal
> with inanimate objects, others that deal with human persons, and yet
> others that deal with supernatural agents. Just as our brains have
> become by evolution such that they inevitably (and mostly
> unconsciously) deploy the complex inferential systems that permit us
> to survive and get around in a world of inanimate objects, so they
> also have become such that we find ideas about full–access strategic
> agents to be plausible because these ideas generate for us rich
> inferences about how to behave and what choices to make, and they do
> so with particular richness in a social context in which we can
> reasonably assume that everyone else shares such ideas.
>
> Scientists themselves thus reverse many traditional attempts to
> explain religion away. It is not that we invent the gods because by so
> doing we can meet needs otherwise difficult to satisfy, or because
> they permit us to explain things otherwise hard to explain, or because
> they give us the illusion of comfort in a harsh and comfortless world,
> or because they give us persuasive reasons to act morally. It is,
> rather, that evolution has equipped us (or most of us) with certain
> proclivities or dispositions to explain misfortune, gain scarce social
> goods, and act morally (roughly, acting in such a way as
> evolutionarily to benefit either ourselves or the tribe).
>
> Moreover, these proclivities dispose us to accept and act upon the
> idea that there are gods—or, if you prefer, full–access strategic
> agents. Evolution makes all of us likely worshipers in much the same
> way that it makes all of us likely language–users. We are innately
> predisposed for both, and so such disparate religious traditions as
> Christian theology, Islamic law, and Buddhist metaphysics are merely
> different forms of baroque ornamentations added on to an evolutionary
> edifice.
>
> Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That
> Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors
> by Pascal
Boyerhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obiÂdos/ASIN/0465006965/
>
>
>
