Andrew Brown ponders the similarities between religion and money:
But the strong analogy between money, which struck me when reading Jonathan West’s comment, was that both money and religious belief make a promise of reciprocity. They define groups of people amongst whom it is true that what goes around, comes around. They make accounting for credit and debit possible – in the one case morally, in the other financially and these accounts are accessible to the whole group. They aren’t just matters or private reckoning or preference. You can put a figure or a name to the transactions involved. They don’t – obviously – make people trustworthy or reliable in themselves. But they provide standards by which trust can be measured, and can spread. And – as numerous experiments in game theory tell us – it is reciprocity which makes possible, and possibly inevitable, the development of altruism.
Find his blog post here.