Yet problems abound for the view that morality comes from God. One problem is that we cannot, without lapsing into tautology, simultaneously say that God is good, and that he gave us our sense of good and bad. That lacks the resonance of " Praise the Lord! A second problem is that there are no moral principles shared by all religious people disregarding their specific religious membership but no agnostics and atheists.
This observation leads to a second: atheists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious believers, even if their virtuous acts are mediated by different principles. They often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, including involvement in movements to abolish slavery and contribute to relief efforts associated with human suffering. One view is that a divine creator handed us the universal bits at the moment of creation.
The alternative, consistent with the facts of biology and geology, is that we have evolved, over millions of years, a moral faculty that generates intuitions about right and wrong. For the first time, research in the cognitive sciences, building on theoretical arguments emerging from moral philosophy, has made it possible to resolve the ancient dispute about the origin and nature of morality. Consider the following three scenarios. For each, fill in the blank with morally " obligatory " , " permissible " or " forbidden.
A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive.
You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond and you are the only one around. Van Pachterbeke, Freyer, and Saroglou found that religiously primed participants displayed support for impersonal societal norms even when upholding such norms would harm individuals the effects reported by Saroglou et al.
And Ginges et al. One might suppose that the effects of such priming on aggression and prejudice count against the hypothesis that intuitions about supernatural observers inhibit moral norm violations.
But without knowing what participants perceive as the relevant norm, this is difficult to establish. For example, in the Bushman et al. There are other reasons to doubt that religious priming studies demonstrate that activating intuitions about punitive supernatural agents curbs moral infractions.
The effect of the secular primes, they suggest, is more consistent with the behavioral priming explanation. Similar considerations apply to a study by Mazar et al. More recently, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich found that even primes of science e. It remains to be demonstrated, however, that the perception that one is observed is what mediates the effect of the primes on behavior.
It is possible that religious priming might activate both surveillance concerns and moral concepts, but that only the latter influence game behavior. Earlier we mentioned methods that potentially conflate distinct moral motivations e. Jesus preached the latter e. If supernatural primes activate concerns for fairness, then primed participants should be more likely to punish violations of fairness norms. If, on the other hand, such primes stimulate kindness, then participants may be less likely to engage in such punishment.
We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviors for a subset of our participants—those who had previously donated to a religious organization. This finding seems consistent with the notion that supernatural agency concepts promote fairness and its enforcement, although, as this study did not disambiguate agency and moral dimensions along the lines suggested earlier, it may be that the effect here was a result of behavioral priming of moral behavior in this case, punishment of unfair behavior rather than activation of supernatural agent concepts.
Another problem is that different idiosyncratic conceptions of God e. When possible, therefore, priming studies should attempt to measure idiosyncratic conceptions of God e.
Overall, we think that religious priming studies provide at least tentative evidence that activating intuitions about supernatural agents curbs moral norm violations. But what of the intuitions themselves? If intuitions about such supernatural punishers are properly foundational , they should be culturally and historically widespread.
However, Baumard and Boyer a note that the gods of numerous classical traditions e. Although these considerations may seem to refute any suggestion that moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are historically and cross-culturally universal, recent work suggests that even when gods are not explicitly represented as caring about human morality, there is nevertheless a moral undercurrent beneath the surface of such explicit, reflective representations Purzycki, In any case, as Graham et al.
Cultural influences may restrict the expression of innate cognitive tendencies, just as they can restrict the expression of innate physical propensities e. However, Graham and colleagues also note that not all cultures are equally informative when it comes to establishing foundationhood. For example, the Hadza of northern Tanzania and the! Kung of the Kalahari Desert are contemporary hunter—gatherer societies with gods who take little interest in human wrongdoing Norenzayan, In our judgment, therefore, it is unlikely that our evolved cognitive systems produce stable intuitions about omnipresent supernatural punishers.
What we think more plausible is that we have a genetically endowed sensitivity to situational cues that our behavior is being observed. A burgeoning literature indicates that even very subtle cues of surveillance influence adherence to prevailing moral norms. In contrast to these studies, Raihani and Bshary found that dictators donated less money in the presence of eye images.
However, these authors only analyzed mean donations, and not the probability of donating something however small. Nettle et al. Bateson, Nettle, and colleagues have found similar effects using an image of a pair of eyes on a notice in naturalistic settings.
Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts found that, compared with images of flowers, eye images substantially increased the level of contributions to an honesty box in a psychology department tea room; and Ernest-Jones, Nettle, and Bateson found that similar images halved the odds of littering in a university cafeteria.
Bourrat, Baumard, and McKay found that such images led to greater condemnation of moral infractions. Relatedly, Cavrak and Kleider-Offutt recently found that participants exposed to religious images associated with a prominent supernatural agent e.
Finally, there is evidence that experimental cues of anonymity rather than of surveillance e. The upshot of all this work is that evolved agency-detection mechanisms may serve to deliver intuitions about observing agents and to regulate our behavior in the presence of those agents.
We doubt, however, that such mechanisms deliver intuitions about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents—instead, we think that the relevant intuitions are more basic just concerning the presence of agency per se. And drawing on intuitions about fairness and the psychological characteristics of intentional agents ToM , such supernatural watcher concepts may morph into more complex, compelling, and culturally transmissible notions of moralizing gods—notions which, when made salient or activated as in priming studies , serve to promote adherence to the perceived norms of those gods.
What this highlights is that we can often make no principled distinction between religion and morality at the level of culture or cognition. Our aim here has been to pinpoint some of the major features in the religious and moral constellations. Recall the analogy drawn earlier between the properties of a hands and gloves, and b evolved cognitive systems and explicit cultural representations.
Whereas hands are biologically evolved features of human anatomy, gloves are culturally evolved artifacts that must follow the contours of the hand at least to some extent in order to be wearable.
In this section, we ask whether, in a similar fashion, culturally evolved belief systems must follow the contours of our evolved cognitive systems. Moreover, from the perspective of our concern with the religion—morality relationship, do cultural systems create durable connections between the moral and religious foundations depicted in Figure 2? In posing these particular questions, we do not mean to suggest that the direction of causality must always run from religion to morality.
In considering these questions, one might seek to supplement the examples in Figure 2 with further examples plucked from the ethnographic record. Although time-consuming, such an exercise would undoubtedly be instructive in many ways.
It would indicate, for example, whether—and how—cultural systems from diverse regions of the world are capable of connecting moral and religious foundations in a variety of ways. It would not, however, address the deeper question of why they do so. Established in the early s and spreading to encompass scores of villages in some of the more remote regions of the island, the movement has a centralized leadership, based at a large coastal settlement, from which regular patrols to outlying villages are sent, bringing news, collecting taxes, and policing the orthodoxy.
The mainstream Kivung exhibits all the fractionated elements of our intuitive religious repertoire: hyperactive agency detection, ToM, teleofunctional reasoning, the ritual stance, and group psychology. And it connects each of these elements to our five moral foundations care, fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity.
At the heart of Kivung teachings is the idea that the ancestors of followers will someday soon return from the dead, bringing with them all the wonders of Western technology. Until that day, however, the ancestors exist only as bodiless agents, discernible by the sounds they make and the traces they leave behind. Failures to observe the laws of the Kivung are said to delay the miracle of returning ancestors. Only when a certain moral threshold has been achieved will the living and the dead be reunited.
This dogma connects with all our moral foundations because the Kivung laws, adapted from the Ten Commandments as taught by Catholic missionaries in the region, forbid such a broad range of transgressions as violence and slander harming , cheating and stealing fairness , criticizing the Kivung loyalty , disobedience respect , and cooking during menses purity. Kivung ideas about ancestors not only link up our moral foundations but also weave intricate connections through discourse and ritual between each of our religious foundations.
For example, among the many rituals observed by Kivung followers is the daily laying out of food offerings to the ancestors. Great attention is paid to the noises of ancestors entering the temple e. This simple ritual requires intense concentration, as it is said that if the ancestors detect insincerity telepathically , they will withhold their forgiveness. Teleofunctional reasoning meanwhile is a pervasive feature of Kivung origin myths and various rituals associated with the sacred gardens one of which memorializes a Melanesian Eden.
And lastly, the Kivung activates group psychology by creating familial ties based on shared ritual experiences and coalitional bonds via us—them thinking in relation to external detractors and critics.
In the end, however, it constitutes a question about how , rather than why , cultural systems create connections between moral and religious foundations. To address the why, we need to consider issues of function and ultimate causation. Two contrasting positions on the why of the morality—religion relationship in cultural evolution have achieved some prominence in recent years.
One takes the form of adaptationist arguments concerning the emergence and spread of routinized rituals and moralizing gods. The other argues that all cultural traditions, however they trace or fail to trace the connections between moral and religious foundations, are by-products of cognitive predispositions and biases, rather than cultural adaptations that enhance the fitness of individuals or groups. We briefly review these alternative positions and consider what evidence would be required to adjudicate satisfactorily between the two.
Scholars in the cognitive science of religion tend to agree that many globally and historically recurrent features of religious thinking and behavior are by-products of cognitive machinery that evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with religion e. Barrett, ; Bloom, ; Boyer, For example, HADDs are thought to have evolved to help support the detection of predators and prey.
If they also undergirded intuitions about the presence of bodiless agents, then this was originally a side effect by-product of their main function J.
Barrett, , , To express this in terms of our body—clothing analogy, if HADDs were equivalent to the evolved anatomy of the hand, then the accumulated cultural knowledge of expert trackers and hunters would be equivalent to the protective functions of gloves, essential for survival in very cold climates.
But gloves can also have decorative frills, like bobbles and tassels, which have no particular survival value. Cultural representations concerning bodiless agents would be decorative frills of this kind. As such, these kinds of functionally superfluous additions need not follow the contour of the hand at all—and might derive their popular appeal precisely from the fact that they do not.
Conceivably, the cultural success of certain Christian ideals e. What distinguishes the adaptationist perspective on religion, however, is the view that at least some of these religious by-products became useful for the survival of individuals and groups in the course of cultural evolution. Most commonly, this argument has been applied to the growth of large-scale societies.
Humans evolved to live in face-to-face bands of hunter—gatherers rather than in vast empires or nations. Small group psychology, it has been argued, would have been insufficient to handle many of the challenges of large group living.
Religion provided cultural adaptations to support the transition from foraging to farming, from local community to state formation. One line of adaptationist thinking has focused on the role of ritual frequency in this transition Whitehouse, We consider each of these approaches in turn.
One of the major challenges in understanding how and why religion changes as societies become larger and more complex relates to the changing structure and function of ritual.
As conditions permitted an escalation of the scale and complexity of human societies, cultural evolutionary processes may have further tuned the elements of ritual, promoting social cohesion.
With the evolution of social complexity, religious rituals become more routinized, dysphoric rituals become less widespread, doctrine and narrative becomes more standardized, beliefs become more universalistic, religion becomes more hierarchical, offices more professionalized, sacred texts help to codify and legitimate emergent orthodoxies, and religious guilds increasingly monopolize resources Whitehouse, , Some of these patterns have recently been documented quantitatively using large samples of religious traditions from the ethnographic record.
Instead, the much more frequent rituals typical of regional and world religions sustain forms of group identification better suited to the kinds of collective action problems presented by interactions among strangers or socially more distant individuals Whitehouse, As rituals become more routinized, however, they also become less stimulating emotionally, and perhaps even more tedious Whitehouse, As some societies became ever larger and more complex, even the processes described here may not have been sufficient to sustain cooperation and a host of new cultural adaptations—most notably, forms of external information storage and secular institutions of governance—became increasingly important Mullins et al.
With the emergence of agriculture and larger, more complex social formations, strangers or relative strangers needed to be able to assess their respective reputational statuses when biographical information was not readily available. The signaling theory of religion and ritual has been recently extended by the theory of credibility enhancing displays CREDS; Henrich, By engaging in costly behaviors, rather than merely advocating such behavior in others i. This is thought to facilitate the spread of moral norms across large populations and safeguard their transmission across the generations.
CREDS theory seeks to explain not only the wide distribution of moral norms in the so-called ethical religions but also the prevalence of moral exemplars in such traditions e.
One of the most vigorous debates in the recent literature on religion and morality has concerned the cultural prevalence of moralizing gods—powerful supernatural agents who monitor behavior and punish moral infractions. Ara Norenzayan and colleagues e. In small-scale and traditional societies in which everybody knows everyone else and most social behavior is easily observed and reported, transgressions are easily detected.
Modern technologies of surveillance, such as police cameras, identity cards, and computer records, allow increasingly extensive monitoring of thieves, cheats, defectors, and free riders by designated authorities. Norenzayan et al. In contrast, Baumard and Boyer a argue incisively that the cultural prevalence of moralizing god representations does not result from the fact that such representations promote socially cohesive behaviors among human groups.
Instead, these representations are successful because they have features e. In short, moralizing gods are cultural variants with effects that enhance their own success and so are adaptive in that sense; Dennett, , but these effects do not include changes in the biological or cultural fitness of their human vectors. How are we to evaluate these opposing views? One feature of Norenzayan et al. As we have seen, a wealth of evidence from priming studies indicates that the activation of supernatural concepts can promote adherence to moral norms.
Do the latter studies undermine the hypothesis of Norenzayan and colleagues? On the contrary, they may be aggressive, murderous, and even genocidal. It is less clear that these findings are consistent with Baumard and Boyer a. The latter authors claim that the success of moralizing god concepts is entirely a result of the resonance of these concepts with the output of intuitive systems, so their theory does not require that these concepts have any effects whatsoever on behavior. Any such effects are incidental and superfluous from their perspective.
They then converted to Christianity, a moralizing religion, and were promptly crushed by barbarians with tribal, nonmoralizing gods. As they acknowledge, however, the gods of antiquity were represented as monitoring the appropriate performance of rituals.
To the extent that rituals represent or promote moral behaviors see earlier , therefore, gods that care about rituals care about morality, directly or indirectly. We note in this connection that common components of ritual performance may facilitate parochially altruistic behaviors, including aggression e. The relationship between religion and morality is a deep and emotive topic.
The confident pronouncements of public commentators belie the bewildering theoretical and methodological complexity of the issues. In the scholarly sphere, progress is frequently impeded by a series of prevailing conceptual limitations and lacunae.
We have set out an encompassing evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. Our view is that cultural representations—concepts, dogmas, artefacts, and practices both prescribed and proscribed—are triggered, shaped, and constrained by a variety of foundational cognitive systems.
We have sought to identify the most currently plausible conjectures about biologically evolved connections between these systems, and have reviewed and evaluated the most prominent published debates in the cultural evolutionary domain. Ultimately, we see and foresee no pithily characterizable relationship between religion and morality. Second, under the pluralistic approach we advocate, which fractionates both religion and morality and distinguishes cognition from culture, the relationship between religion and morality expands into a matrix of separate relationships between fractionated elements.
Although we eschew a simplistic story, we live in a very exciting time for psychological research on this topic. The aim should be to settle upon a parsimonious set of culturally and historically widespread cognitive predispositions that exhibit developmental and comparative evidence of innate preparedness, and that jointly account for the great bulk of culturally distributed items falling under the umbrella of religion and morality.
On the one hand, morality may require God in the sense that the very notion of morality is incoherent without God i. This is what Socrates had in mind and disputed. On the other hand, morality may require God in the sense that belief in God is needed to enforce moral behavior. This is what Dostoevsky meant.
Cohen and colleagues e. Cohen, ; A. Some religions e. The point that scientific research on religion should consider all four whys has been eloquently made by Hinde and informs his writings on religion more generally e.
This lesson is particularly important when considering evidence germane to the religion—morality debate. Although they found a positive relationship between intensity of religiosity and altruism in the dictator game, they acknowledged that the causality of this relationship could have run from altruism to religiosity, or that unobserved third variables may have influenced both altruism and religiosity. The second player has a completely passive role which is why the dictator game is not, strictly speaking, a game and must accept whatever the first player transfers.
In a public goods game, players privately choose how much of an endowment to donate to a public pot. For example, punishment of unfairness has been associated both with self-control e. At present, there is no official moral foundation of self-control.
And thanks to God for it. Hadnes and Schumacher found that priming West African villagers with traditional beliefs substantially increased trustworthy behavior in an economic trust game. Aveyard tested a sample of Middle Eastern Muslim undergraduates and found that whereas a laboratory priming manipulation had no effect on their cheating rates, participants exposed to a naturalistic religious prime—the Islamic call to prayer—cheated substantially less.
Johnson, The database contains quantitative variables describing numerous characteristics of the societies in the sample. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Psychological Bulletin.
Psychol Bull. Published online Dec Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Corresponding author. Copyright for this article is retained by the author s. Author s grant s the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract The relationship between religion and morality has long been hotly debated. Keywords: cognitive science of religion, moral foundations theory, prosocial behavior, cultural evolution. It is simply impossible for people to be moral without religion or God. Open in a separate window.
Figure 1. Conceptual Lacunae and Confusions in the Religion and Morality Debate Despite the confident claims of many contemporary commentators, we believe the relationship between religion and morality is poorly understood. Astrologizing History can be written at any magnification. Descriptive Ethnocentrism If moral psychology is to contribute to the psychology of religion, it will have to describe a moral domain as expansive as that of the Gods.
Sanitized Conceptions of Morality and Prosociality Ingroup generosity and outgroup derogation actually represent two sides of the same coin. Cognitive Versus Cultural Levels of Explanation Efforts to fully characterize the relationship between religion and morality are limited by a tendency for researchers to conceptualize morality or religion as bundles of either cognitively or culturally evolved traits rather than both.
Religion and Morality: A New Approach In order to circumvent these limitations and avoid these problems, we propose a new approach to the religion—morality debate that not only fractionates both religion and morality but is careful to distinguish the different levels at which explanation is required.
Figure 2. Moral foundations theorists have put forward their own celestial analogy to describe the process of identifying foundations: There are millions of objects orbiting the sun, but astronomers do not call them all planets. Fractionating Religion: Religious Foundations? Teleofunctional Explanations Another foundational cognitive predisposition where religion is concerned may be a tendency to favor teleofunctional reasoning. Kinship Detection Inclusive fitness theory predicts that organisms will behave in ways that preferentially benefit kin, with more benefits conferred as the degree of genetic relatedness between the actor and the recipient increases Hamilton, As Pinker points out, kin recognition in humans depends on cues in particular, linguistic cues that others can manipulate: Thus people are also altruistic toward their adoptive relatives, and toward a variety of fictive kin such as brothers in arms, fraternities and sororities, occupational and religious brotherhoods, crime families, fatherlands, and mother countries.
The Religion—Morality Relationship in Biological Evolution A key feature of our approach is to consider whether the fractionated components of morality and religion have overlapping evolutionary histories. Supernatural Agent Intuitions and Morality Surveys indicate that people who score higher on indices of religiosity e.
The Cross-Cultural Prevalence of Supernatural Punishment Concepts If intuitions about such supernatural punishers are properly foundational , they should be culturally and historically widespread. The Religion—Morality Relationship in Cultural Evolution Recall the analogy drawn earlier between the properties of a hands and gloves, and b evolved cognitive systems and explicit cultural representations.
Adaptationist and By-Product Accounts Two contrasting positions on the why of the morality—religion relationship in cultural evolution have achieved some prominence in recent years. Routinization One of the major challenges in understanding how and why religion changes as societies become larger and more complex relates to the changing structure and function of ritual. Conclusion The relationship between religion and morality is a deep and emotive topic. Footnotes 1 Here we conflate two different senses in which morality may require God.
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Annual Review of Psychology , 62 , — Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion. Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning.
Now it is important that we remain clear in understanding the issue before us. The question is not : Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives? There is no reason to think that atheists and theists alike may not live what we normally characterize as good and decent lives.
Similarly, the question is not : Can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God? If the non-theist grants that human beings do have objective value, then there is no reason to think that he cannot work out a system of ethics with which the theist would also largely agree. Or again, the question is not : Can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God?
The theist will typically maintain that a person need not believe in God in order to recognize, say, that we should love our children. If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in some transcendent ground, are they purely ephemeral? If there is no God, then any ground for regarding the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed.
After all, what is so special about human beings? They are just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. Some action, say, incest, may not be biologically or socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo; but there is on the atheistic view nothing really wrong about committing incest.
The objective worthlessness of human beings on a naturalistic world view is underscored by two implications of that world view: materialism and determinism. Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists, who regard man as a purely animal organism. But if man has no immaterial aspect to his being call it soul or mind or what have you , then he is not qualitatively different from other animal species.
For him to regard human morality as objective is to fall into the trap of specie-ism. On a materialistic anthropology there is no reason to think that human beings are objectively more valuable than rats. Secondly, if there is no mind distinct from the brain, then everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic make-up. There is no personal agent who freely decides to do something.
But without freedom, none of our choices is morally significant. And what moral value does a puppet or its movements have?
Thus, if naturalism is true, it becomes impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, or love as good. It does not matter what values you choose—for there is no right and wrong; good and evil do not exist. That means that an atrocity like the Holocaust was really morally indifferent.
You may think that it was wrong, but your opinion has no more validity than that of the Nazi war criminal who thought it was good. In his book Morality after Auschwitz , Peter Haas asks how an entire society could have willingly participated in a state-sponsored program of mass torture and genocide for over a decade without any serious opposition. He argues that. Moreover, Haas points out, because of its coherence and internal consistency, the Nazi ethic could not be discredited from within.
Only from a transcendent vantage point which stands above relativistic, socio-cultural mores could such a critique be launched. But in the absence of God, it is precisely such a vantage point that we lack. One Rabbi who was imprisoned at Auschwitz said that it was as though all the Ten Commandments had been reversed: thou shalt kill, thou shalt lie, thou shalt steal.
Mankind has never seen such a hell. And yet, in a real sense, if naturalism is true, our world is Auschwitz. There is no good and evil, no right and wrong. Objective moral values do not exist. Even if there were objective moral values and duties under naturalism, they are irrelevant because there is no moral accountability.
If life ends at the grave, it makes no difference whether one lives as a Stalin or as a saint. The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human.
There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. We can do what we wish. Given the finality of death, it really does not matter how you live. So what do you say to someone who concludes that we may as well just live as we please, out of pure self-interest? This presents a pretty grim picture for an atheistic ethicist like Kai Nielsen of the University of Calgary. He writes,. We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists.
The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality. Somebody might say that it is in our best self-interest to adopt a moral life-style. But clearly, that is not always true: we all know situations in which self-interest runs smack in the face of morality. Moreover, if one is sufficiently powerful, like a Ferdinand Marcos or a Papa Doc Duvalier or even a Donald Trump, then one can pretty much ignore the dictates of conscience and safely live in self-indulgence.
Historian Stewart C. Acts of self-sacrifice become particularly inept on a naturalistic world view. Why should you sacrifice your self-interest and especially your life for the sake of someone else? There can be no good reason for adopting such a self-negating course of action on the naturalistic world view. Considered from the socio-biological point of view, such altruistic behavior is merely the result of evolutionary conditioning which helps to perpetuate the species.
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