*Politics and Geography

Steven Pinker provides some commentary on the predictability of certain geographical areas and political affiliations. When we look at a map of the U.S. during election time, there are a majority of states that are predictably red or blue, republican or democrat.

Scholars have stated that these political differences are the differences in conceptions of human nature. What we are concerned about, what kind of people we are, what kind of things we wish to see in government, certain policies and certain visions of the relationship between human nature and society; different visions of human nature.

He comes to the suggestion that, at least in America, the people are divided based on how government has "tamed" them. He states: "If this history is right, the American political divide may have arisen not so much from different conceptions of human nature as from differences in how best to tame it."

This makes me wonder if this can be applied to religion and those who figure themselves as religious within a particular tradition. In other words, has religion, in its many diversities, configured us in how we view human nature by and large by the way religion has "tamed" us. Thereby configuring our conceptions of how we believe society ought and should be. Or perhaps it is even the way government has managed human nature that has dictated in a way how religion manages the people. This now becomes a concern about how social structures influence the way we think human nature and government is as well as should and ought to be. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/why-are-states-so-red-and-blue/