Anthropology Of Religion's topics - tribe.net

Dedications to Hindu/Chinese Deities!

2008-06-17T04:14:52Z

Hey guys, I am particularly interested in offerings bestowed to Hindu and Chinese deities, such as incense, foods, herbs, and flowers, as well as any mythic (ie. scriptural) justification for this. Anyone know of any texts that are heavy in this regard?

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scholars expose anti-Indianism in America

2008-01-24T03:45:49Z

You all heard of this book:
_unlearning the language of conquest: scholars expose anti-indianism in america_ by Four Arrows (don Trent Jacobs), 2006

i'd be curious as to what your science has to tell you on this topic, and what students of the discipline are being taught these days.

Take a look at excerpts of the book:
www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exjacunl.html

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WHY do humans have religion...

2008-01-11T21:04:26Z

This it to maybe get people started talking. WHY do you think that humans find the need to have religion...according to cultural anthropologists, there are certain steps that humans go through in their belief systems, to get to what we know as organized religion. Usually brought about by charismatic leaders, who claim to be prophets. What are your thoughts on this folks? Maybe thiw will break the ice and maybe we can get a short bio from people to introduce themselves.

Tammy

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 32 replies

Shamanic Antecedants of Potion-Crafting?

2007-11-04T06:30:21Z

Hey guys, I am presently culling together some research for a class and book I'd eventually like to write all about potions and potion-crafting! Anyway, part of that project is to research the history of potions and potion-making, and how it came to be associated with witches and witchraft in as many cultures as possible. So...I was wondering if anyone could recommend any secondary or primary sources worth reading that may contain such info.? Even pagans created potions, as I understand, which I want to investigate (for example, the Greels apparently used violet petals in love potions); though I always want to investigate any plausible shamanic and tribal antecedants for potion-crafting and usage or belief. So, again, anyone know of any sources that I might turn to as I begin this research?

Take Care,
Wade

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

The Familiar as Entoptic Phenom.

2007-11-03T21:38:51Z

Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone here could recommend any lit. re: Spirit-Animals and Familiars sharing traits with entopic phenominon? I ask, because one hypothesis I want to test is that the Familiar visionary encounters may be an entopitic phenominon as described by Lewis-Williams' three-stage model of a neurologically engrained visionary model. I came to this query when looking at a famous depiction of Matthew Hopkins with alleged witches and the Familiars which seem to often share this bizarre amalgum of various animals or species, etc. So...I am looking for trial ercord accounts from Europe and Britain, as well as Familiar encounters from Asia and elsewhere, not to mention encounters of spirit-animals that seem to blend into various species (think, perhaps, the American "jackalope", etc.! *G*). Can anyone direct me to any source-material or ethnographic studies, and second hand sources, please?

Take Care,
Wade

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

New Tribe....Religious and Spiritual Art (Apparitions

2007-08-27T03:35:20Z

Apparitions, Holly relics, Inspired artists, Anomalies, ETC.
http://tribes.tribe.net/eb5f7908-cda1-40f9-9648-e8b00b84292f#
Most of the threads in this tribe will be presented in the photo gallery as supported evedence
So don't forget to turn off you topics only option..and and view all

Religion has been the most inspiring theme for artest's throughout the ages
Featured here will be statues, paintings, scupltures,scetches, ETC.

!!!!!!!!All religions welcome!!!!!!!!
(Even those who seek only a skeptical view....Even you can serve as a control ..and disclaimer)

Let’s bring enlightened art visions here and create a database that we can all share and be proud of
Photo’s photo's photos

Your own Art is also Welcome and encouraged here

FOLKLORE AND MYTHOLOGY
http://tribes.tribe.net/b9b544af-89e5-4aa7-8dec-c917f83c3bd7?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5Bb9b544af-89e5-4aa7-8dec-c917f83c3bd7%5D
Religious and Spiritual Art (Apparitions

http://tribes.tribe.net/eb5f7908-cda1-40f9-9648-e8b00b84292f?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5Beb5f7908-cda1-40f9-9648-e8b00b84292f%5D

Famous Quotes and Short Stories tribe
http://tribes.tribe.net/8644c865-e362-4b4d-917e-a8ca42c4fd9d?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5B8644c865-e362-4b4d-917e-a8ca42c4fd9d%5D

BIRDMAN - tribe.net:

http://tribes.tribe.net/25a1f4a7-b777-4adf-8c62-1f418aaf0d64?current=tribeallposts&set=y#tabs

Subliminal Messages and Propaganda - tribe.net:
http://tribes.tribe.net/e388baea-51eb-417f-9390-06fe37f92e41

PROPHETS and VISSIONARIES... WE ARE... - tribe.net:
http://tribes.tribe.net/bac54dd7-c43a-45c5-a716-6d241843a31f

The Prophecy of Magog - tribe.net:
http://tribes.tribe.net/d64e82b0-72ef-4c72-b5e7-299383c1d4e0

WARTIME
http://tribes.tribe.net/542c9b86-93b1-4b12-bc96-a754f89c5e8e?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5B542c9b86-93b1-4b12-bc96-a754f89c5e8e%5D

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

Problem of Suffering Writings

2007-05-13T12:42:18Z

I'm looking for anthropological works on the Problem of Suffering. I already have all the philosophical works I need (C.S. Lewis, Hick, Leibnitz, etc.). I need something from the sociocultural arena. I have a small essay by Geertz (such a wonderful writer), but it covers the purpose of religion in general with only a passing mention of suffering. Any suggestions.

Thanks in advance!
Vale!

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 18 replies

NYT: Darwin's God

2007-04-05T04:35:36Z

Long article about why people have come to believe in God from this Sunday's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html

(Posted in full here because NY Times articles stop being free to read after 2 weeks)

God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. “God exists,” he wrote in black and orange paint, “or if he doesn’t, we’re in trouble.” Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since — why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do.

Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Atran first conducted the magic-box demonstration in the 1980s, when he was at Cambridge University studying the nature of religious belief. He had received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University and, in the course of his fieldwork, saw evidence of religion everywhere he looked — at archaeological digs in Israel, among the Mayans in Guatemala, in artifact drawers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view?

The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the ’80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists — not whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does.

This is different from the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering attention recently, in the form of best-selling books from scientific atheists who see religion as a scourge. In “The God Delusion,” published last year and still on best-seller lists, the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins concludes that religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. “Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful,” Dawkins wrote. He is joined by two other best-selling authors — Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith,” and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University who wrote “Breaking the Spell.” The three men differ in their personal styles and whether they are engaged in a battle against religiosity, but their names are often mentioned together. They have been portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world view with a fervor that seems almost evangelical.

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there?

In short, are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?

“All of our raptures and our drynesses, our longings and pantings, our questions and beliefs . . . are equally organically founded,” William James wrote in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” James, who taught philosophy and experimental psychology at Harvard for more than 30 years, based his book on a 1901 lecture series in which he took some early tentative steps at breaching the science-religion divide.

In the century that followed, a polite convention generally separated science and religion, at least in much of the Western world. Science, as the old trope had it, was assigned the territory that describes how the heavens go; religion, how to go to heaven.

Anthropologists like Atran and psychologists as far back as James had been looking at the roots of religion, but the mutual hands-off policy really began to shift in the 1990s. Religion made incursions into the traditional domain of science with attempts to bring intelligent design into the biology classroom and to choke off human embryonic stem-cell research on religious grounds. Scientists responded with counterincursions. Experts from the hard sciences, like evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, joined anthropologists and psychologists in the study of religion, making God an object of scientific inquiry.

The debate over why belief evolved is between byproduct theorists and adaptationists. You might think that the byproduct theorists would tend to be nonbelievers, looking for a way to explain religion as a fluke, while the adaptationists would be more likely to be believers who can intuit the emotional, spiritual and community advantages that accompany faith. Or you might think they would all be atheists, because what believer would want to subject his own devotion to rationalism’s cold, hard scrutiny? But a scientist’s personal religious view does not always predict which side he will take. And this is just one sign of how complex and surprising this debate has become.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories. Charles Darwin noted this in “The Descent of Man.” “A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies,” he wrote, “seems to be universal.” According to anthropologists, religions that share certain supernatural features — belief in a noncorporeal God or gods, belief in the afterlife, belief in the ability of prayer or ritual to change the course of human events — are found in virtually every culture on earth.

This is certainly true in the United States. About 6 in 10 Americans, according to a 2005 Harris Poll, believe in the devil and hell, and about 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and of life after death. A 2006 survey at Baylor University found that 92 percent of respondents believe in a personal God — that is, a God with a distinct set of character traits ranging from “distant” to “benevolent.”

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success. In many ways, it’s an exercise in post-hoc hypothesizing: what would have been the advantage, when the human species first evolved, for an individual who happened to have a mutation that led to, say, a smaller jaw, a bigger forehead, a better thumb? How about certain behavioral traits, like a tendency for risk-taking or for kindness?

Atran saw such questions as a puzzle when applied to religion. So many aspects of religious belief involve misattribution and misunderstanding of the real world. Wouldn’t this be a liability in the survival-of-the-fittest competition? To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.” One example of this is the belief that even after someone dies and the body demonstrably disintegrates, that person will still exist, will still be able to laugh and cry, to feel pain and joy. This confusion “does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion” in 2002. “Imagine another animal that took injury for health or big for small or fast for slow or dead for alive. It’s unlikely that such a species could survive.” He began to look for a sideways explanation: if religious belief was not adaptive, perhaps it was associated with something else that was.

Atran intended to study mathematics when he entered Columbia as a precocious 17-year-old. But he was distracted by the radical politics of the late ’60s. One day in his freshman year, he found himself at an antiwar rally listening to Margaret Mead, then perhaps the most famous anthropologist in America. Atran, dressed in a flamboyant Uncle Sam suit, stood up and called her a sellout for saying the protesters should be writing to their congressmen instead of staging demonstrations. “Young man,” the unflappable Mead said, “why don’t you come see me in my office?”

Atran, equally unflappable, did go to see her — and ended up working for Mead, spending much of his time exploring the cabinets of curiosities in her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. Soon he switched his major to anthropology.

Many of the museum specimens were religious, Atran says. So were the artifacts he dug up on archaeological excursions in Israel in the early ’70s. Wherever he turned, he encountered the passion of religious belief. Why, he wondered, did people work so hard against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?

Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.

While still an undergraduate, Atran decided to explore these questions by organizing a conference on universal aspects of culture and inviting all his intellectual heroes: the linguist Noam Chomsky, the psychologist Jean Piaget, the anthropologists Claude Levi-Strauss and Gregory Bateson (who was also Margaret Mead’s ex-husband), the Nobel Prize-winning biologists Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob. It was 1974, and the only site he could find for the conference was at a location just outside Paris. Atran was a scraggly 22-year-old with a guitar who had learned his French from comic books. To his astonishment, everyone he invited agreed to come.

Atran is a sociable man with sharp hazel eyes, who sparks provocative conversations the way other men pick bar fights. As he traveled in the ’70s and ’80s, he accumulated friends who were thinking about the issues he was: how culture is transmitted among human groups and what evolutionary function it might serve. “I started looking at history, and I wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious foundation as its raison d’être,” he says. Soon he turned to an emerging subset of evolutionary theory — the evolution of human cognition.

Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence of other mental modules.

Religion, in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.”

At around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists — Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at Yale — were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the byproduct theory.

Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase” and “capture.” They did not just see the random movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”

A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. “We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us,” Barrett wrote, “and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.” The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.

A third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory of mind. It’s an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word “theory” suggests formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have been used for the same concept, like intentional stance and social cognition. One good alternative is the term Atran uses: folkpsychology.

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.

The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

The traditional psychological view has been that until about age 4, children think that minds are permeable and that everyone knows whatever the child himself knows. To a young child, everyone is infallible. All other people, especially Mother and Father, are thought to have the same sort of insight as an all-knowing God.

But at a certain point in development, this changes. (Some new research suggests this might occur as early as 15 months.) The “false-belief test” is a classic experiment that highlights the boundary. Children watch a puppet show with a simple plot: John comes onstage holding a marble, puts it in Box A and walks off. Mary comes onstage, opens Box A, takes out the marble, puts it in Box B and walks off. John comes back onstage. The children are asked, Where will John look for the marble?

Very young children, or autistic children of any age, say John will look in Box B, since they know that’s where the marble is. But older children give a more sophisticated answer. They know that John never saw Mary move the marble and that as far as he is concerned it is still where he put it, in Box A. Older children have developed a theory of mind; they understand that other people sometimes have false beliefs. Even though they know that the marble is in Box B, they respond that John will look for it in Box A.

The adaptive advantage of folkpsychology is obvious. According to Atran, our ancestors needed it to survive their harsh environment, since folkpsychology allowed them to “rapidly and economically” distinguish good guys from bad guys. But how did folkpsychology — an understanding of ordinary people’s ordinary minds — allow for a belief in supernatural, omniscient minds? And if the byproduct theorists are right and these beliefs were of little use in finding food or leaving more offspring, why did they persist?

Atran ascribes the persistence to evolutionary misdirection, which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones, he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh, yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain way or feel a certain allegiance.

That is what most fascinated Atran. “Why is God in there?” he wondered.

The idea of an infallible God is comfortable and familiar, something children readily accept. You can see this in the experiment Justin Barrett conducted recently — a version of the traditional false-belief test but with a religious twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?

As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”

And what would God say? No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.” This was true even for the older children, who, as Barrett understood it, had developed folkpsychology and had used it when predicting a wrong response for Mother. They had learned that, in certain situations, people could be fooled — but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.

The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped.

Whatever the specifics, certain beliefs can be found in all religions. Those that prevail, according to the byproduct theorists, are those that fit most comfortably with our mental architecture. Psychologists have shown, for instance, that people attend to, and remember, things that are unfamiliar and strange, but not so strange as to be impossible to assimilate. Ideas about God or other supernatural agents tend to fit these criteria. They are what Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist and psychologist, called “minimally counterintuitive”: weird enough to get your attention and lodge in your memory but not so weird that you reject them altogether. A tree that talks is minimally counterintuitive, and you might believe it as a supernatural agent. A tree that talks and flies and time-travels is maximally counterintuitive, and you are more likely to reject it.

Atran, along with Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, studied the idea of minimally counterintuitive agents earlier this decade. They presented college students with lists of fantastical creatures and asked them to choose the ones that seemed most “religious.” The convincingly religious agents, the students said, were not the most outlandish — not the turtle that chatters and climbs or the squealing, flowering marble — but those that were just outlandish enough: giggling seaweed, a sobbing oak, a talking horse. Giggling seaweed meets the requirement of being minimally counterintuitive, Atran wrote. So does a God who has a human personality except that he knows everything or a God who has a mind but has no body.

It is not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a spot in people’s belief systems. An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold. “If your emotions are involved, then that’s the time when you’re most likely to believe whatever the religion tells you to believe,” Atran says. Religions stir up emotions through their rituals — swaying, singing, bowing in unison during group prayer, sometimes working people up to a state of physical arousal that can border on frenzy. And religions gain strength during the natural heightening of emotions that occurs in times of personal crisis, when the faithful often turn to shamans or priests. The most intense personal crisis, for which religion can offer powerfully comforting answers, is when someone comes face to face with mortality.

In John Updike’s celebrated early short story “Pigeon Feathers,” 14-year-old David spends a lot of time thinking about death. He suspects that adults are lying when they say his spirit will live on after he dies. He keeps catching them in inconsistencies when he asks where exactly his soul will spend eternity. “Don’t you see,” he cries to his mother, “if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.”

The story ends with David’s tiny revelation and his boundless relief. The boy gets a gun for his 15th birthday, which he uses to shoot down some pigeons that have been nesting in his grandmother’s barn. Before he buries them, he studies the dead birds’ feathers. He is amazed by their swirls of color, “designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture.” And suddenly the fears that have plagued him are lifted, and with a “slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

Fear of death is an undercurrent of belief. The spirits of dead ancestors, ghosts, immortal deities, heaven and hell, the everlasting soul: the notion of spiritual existence after death is at the heart of almost every religion. According to some adaptationists, this is part of religion’s role, to help humans deal with the grim certainty of death. Believing in God and the afterlife, they say, is how we make sense of the brevity of our time on earth, how we give meaning to this brutish and short existence. Religion can offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the frightened.

But the spandrelists counter that saying these beliefs are consolation does not mean they offered an adaptive advantage to our ancestors. “The human mind does not produce adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear,” wrote Pascal Boyer, a leading byproduct theorist, in “Religion Explained,” which came out a year before Atran’s book. “Indeed, any organism that was prone to such delusions would not survive long.”

Whether or not it is adaptive, belief in the afterlife gains power in two ways: from the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it seems to get from the real world. This brings us back to folkpsychology. We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues. This is what young children seem to do, as a study at the Florida Atlantic University demonstrated a few years ago. Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund, the psychologists who conducted the study, used finger puppets to act out the story of a mouse, hungry and lost, who is spotted by an alligator. “Well, it looks like Brown Mouse got eaten by Mr. Alligator,” the narrator says at the end. “Brown Mouse is not alive anymore.”

Afterward, Bering and Bjorklund asked their subjects, ages 4 to 12, what it meant for Brown Mouse to be “not alive anymore.” Is he still hungry? Is he still sleepy? Does he still want to go home? Most said the mouse no longer needed to eat or drink. But a large proportion, especially the younger ones, said that he still had thoughts, still loved his mother and still liked cheese. The children understood what it meant for the mouse’s body to cease to function, but many believed that something about the mouse was still alive.

“Our psychological architecture makes us think in particular ways,” says Bering, now at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. “In this study, it seems, the reason afterlife beliefs are so prevalent is that underlying them is our inability to simulate our nonexistence.”

It might be just as impossible to simulate the nonexistence of loved ones. A large part of any relationship takes place in our minds, Bering said, so it’s natural for it to continue much as before after the other person’s death. It is easy to forget that your sister is dead when you reach for the phone to call her, since your relationship was based so much on memory and imagined conversations even when she was alive. In addition, our agent-detection device sometimes confirms the sensation that the dead are still with us. The wind brushes our cheek, a spectral shape somehow looks familiar and our agent detection goes into overdrive. Dreams, too, have a way of confirming belief in the afterlife, with dead relatives appearing in dreams as if from beyond the grave, seeming very much alive.

Belief is our fallback position, according to Bering; it is our reflexive style of thought. “We have a basic psychological capacity that allows anyone to reason about unexpected natural events, to see deeper meaning where there is none,” he says. “It’s natural; it’s how our minds work.”

Intriguing as the spandrel logic might be, there is another way to think about the evolution of religion: that religion evolved because it offered survival advantages to our distant ancestors. This is where the action is in the science of God debate, with a coterie of adaptationists arguing on behalf of the primary benefits, in terms of survival advantages, of religious belief.

The trick in thinking about adaptation is that even if a trait offers no survival advantage today, it might have had one long ago. This is how Darwinians explain how certain physical characteristics persist even if they do not currently seem adaptive — by asking whether they might have helped our distant ancestors form social groups, feed themselves, find suitable mates or keep from getting killed. A facility for storing calories as fat, for instance, which is a detriment in today’s food-rich society, probably helped our ancestors survive cyclical famines.

So trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

Such sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.

One of the most vocal adaptationists is David Sloan Wilson, an occasional thorn in the side of both Scott Atran and Richard Dawkins. Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, focuses much of his argument at the group level. “Organisms are a product of natural selection,” he wrote in “Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society,” which came out in 2002, the same year as Atran’s book, and staked out the adaptationist view. “Through countless generations of variation and selection, [organisms] acquire properties that enable them to survive and reproduce in their environments. My purpose is to see if human groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify as organismic in this sense.”

Wilson’s father was Sloan Wilson, author of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” an emblem of mid-’50s suburban anomie that was turned into a film starring Gregory Peck. Sloan Wilson became a celebrity, with young women asking for his autograph, especially after his next novel, “A Summer Place,” became another blockbuster movie. The son grew up wanting to do something to make his famous father proud.

“I knew I couldn’t be a novelist,” said Wilson, who crackled with intensity during a telephone interview, “so I chose something as far as possible from literature — I chose science.” He is disarmingly honest about what motivated him: “I was very ambitious, and I wanted to make a mark.” He chose to study human evolution, he said, in part because he had some of his father’s literary leanings and the field required a novelist’s attention to human motivations, struggles and alliances — as well as a novelist’s flair for narrative.

Wilson eventually chose to study religion not because religion mattered to him personally — he was raised in a secular Protestant household and says he has long been an atheist — but because it was a lens through which to look at and revivify a branch of evolution that had fallen into disrepute. When Wilson was a graduate student at Michigan State University in the 1970s, Darwinians were critical of group selection, the idea that human groups can function as single organisms the way beehives or anthills do. So he decided to become the man who rescued this discredited idea. “I thought, Wow, defending group selection — now, that would be big,” he recalled. It wasn’t until the 1990s, he said, that he realized that “religion offered an opportunity to show that group selection was right after all.”

Dawkins once called Wilson’s defense of group selection “sheer, wanton, head-in-bag perversity.” Atran, too, has been dismissive of this approach, calling it “mind blind” for essentially ignoring the role of the brain’s mental machinery. The adaptationists “cannot in principle distinguish Marxism from monotheism, ideology from religious belief,” Atran wrote. “They cannot explain why people can be more steadfast in their commitment to admittedly counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs — that Mary is both a mother and a virgin, and God is sentient but bodiless — than to the most politically, economically or scientifically persuasive account of the way things are or should be.”

Still, for all its controversial elements, the narrative Wilson devised about group selection and the evolution of religion is clear, perhaps a legacy of his novelist father. Begin, he says, with an imaginary flock of birds. Some birds serve as sentries, scanning the horizon for predators and calling out warnings. Having a sentry is good for the group but bad for the sentry, which is doubly harmed: by keeping watch, the sentry has less time to gather food, and by issuing a warning call, it is more likely to be spotted by the predator. So in the Darwinian struggle, the birds most likely to pass on their genes are the nonsentries. How, then, could the sentry gene survive for more than a generation or two?

To explain how a self-sacrificing gene can persist, Wilson looks to the level of the group. If there are 10 sentries in one group and none in the other, 3 or 4 of the sentries might be sacrificed. But the flock with sentries will probably outlast the flock that has no early-warning system, so the other 6 or 7 sentries will survive to pass on the genes. In other words, if the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.

There are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup struggle, according to Wilson, the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.

There is another element here too, unique to humans because it depends on language. A person’s behavior is observed not only by those in his immediate surroundings but also by anyone who can hear about it. There might be clear costs to taking on a role analogous to the sentry bird — a person who stands up to authority, for instance, risks losing his job, going to jail or getting beaten by the police — but in humans, these local costs might be outweighed by long-distance benefits. If a particular selfless trait enhances a person’s reputation, spread through the written and spoken word, it might give him an advantage in many of life’s challenges, like finding a mate. One way that reputation is enhanced is by being ostentatiously religious.

“The study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs,” Wilson wrote in “Darwin’s Cathedral.” It might seem disadvantageous, in terms of foraging for sustenance and safety, for someone to favor religious over rationalistic explanations that would point to where the food and danger are. But in some circumstances, he wrote, “a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.” For the individual, it might be more adaptive to have “highly sophisticated mental modules for acquiring factual knowledge and for building symbolic belief systems” than to have only one or the other, according to Wilson. For the group, it might be that a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.”

Even if Wilson is right that religion enhances group fitness, the question remains: Where does God come in? Why is a religious group any different from groups for which a fitness argument is never even offered — a group of fraternity brothers, say, or Yankees fans?

Richard Sosis, an anthropologist with positions at the University of Connecticut and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has suggested a partial answer. Like many adaptationists, Sosis focuses on the way religion might be adaptive at the individual level. But even adaptations that help an individual survive can sometimes play themselves out through the group. Consider religious rituals.

“Religious and secular rituals can both promote cooperation,” Sosis wrote in American Scientist in 2004. But religious rituals “generate greater belief and commitment” because they depend on belief rather than on proof. The rituals are “beyond the possibility of examination,” he wrote, and a commitment to them is therefore emotional rather than logical — a commitment that is, in Sosis’s view, deeper and more long-lasting.

Rituals are a way of signaling a sincere commitment to the religion’s core beliefs, thereby earning loyalty from others in the group. “By donning several layers of clothing and standing out in the midday sun,” Sosis wrote, “ultraorthodox Jewish men are signaling to others: ‘Hey! Look, I’m a haredi’ — or extremely pious — ‘Jew. If you are also a member of this group, you can trust me because why else would I be dressed like this?’ ” These “signaling” rituals can grant the individual a sense of belonging and grant the group some freedom from constant and costly monitoring to ensure that their members are loyal and committed. The rituals are harsh enough to weed out the infidels, and both the group and the individual believers benefit.

In 2003, Sosis and Bradley Ruffle of Ben Gurion University in Israel sought an explanation for why Israel’s religious communes did better on average than secular communes in the wake of the economic crash of most of the country’s kibbutzim. They based their study on a standard economic game that measures cooperation. Individuals from religious communes played the game more cooperatively, while those from secular communes tended to be more selfish. It was the men who attended synagogue daily, not the religious women or the less observant men, who showed the biggest differences. To Sosis, this suggested that what mattered most was the frequent public display of devotion. These rituals, he wrote, led to greater cooperation in the religious communes, which helped them maintain their communal structure during economic hard times.

In 1997, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in Natural History that called for a truce between religion and science. “The net of science covers the empirical universe,” he wrote. “The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.” Gould was emphatic about keeping the domains separate, urging “respectful discourse” and “mutual humility.” He called the demarcation “nonoverlapping magisteria” from the Latin magister, meaning “canon.”

Richard Dawkins had a history of spirited arguments with Gould, with whom he disagreed about almost everything related to the timing and focus of evolution. But he reserved some of his most venomous words for nonoverlapping magisteria. “Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths,” he wrote in “The God Delusion.” “Why shouldn’t we comment on God, as scientists? . . . A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?”

The separation, other critics said, left untapped the potential richness of letting one worldview inform the other. “Even if Gould was right that there were two domains, what religion does and what science does,” says Daniel Dennett (who, despite his neo-atheist label, is not as bluntly antireligious as Dawkins and Harris are), “that doesn’t mean science can’t study what religion does. It just means science can’t do what religion does.”

The idea that religion can be studied as a natural phenomenon might seem to require an atheistic philosophy as a starting point. Not necessarily. Even some neo-atheists aren’t entirely opposed to religion. Sam Harris practices Buddhist-inspired meditation. Daniel Dennett holds an annual Christmas sing-along, complete with hymns and carols that are not only harmonically lush but explicitly pious.

And one prominent member of the byproduct camp, Justin Barrett, is an observant Christian who believes in “an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God who brought the universe into being,” as he wrote in an e-mail message. “I believe that the purpose for people is to love God and love each other.”

At first blush, Barrett’s faith might seem confusing. How does his view of God as a byproduct of our mental architecture coexist with his Christianity? Why doesn’t the byproduct theory turn him into a skeptic?

“Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people,” Barrett wrote in his e-mail message. “Why wouldn’t God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them, he wrote. “Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?”

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.

This internal push and pull between the spiritual and the rational reflects what used to be called the “God of the gaps” view of religion. The presumption was that as science was able to answer more questions about the natural world, God would be invoked to answer fewer, and religion would eventually recede. Research about the evolution of religion suggests otherwise. No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.

Robin Marantz Henig, a contributing writer, has written recently for the magazine about the neurobiology of lying and about obesity.

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply

Back 2 School

2007-01-05T23:57:38Z

Hi,

I am looking for recommendations of Anthropology of Religion programs in the west coast that have some sort of in house expertise of hindusim, bhakti and new religious movements / new age / western esotericism. Somewhere where I can eventually write something about American Kirtan would be great.

Thanks!

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 4 replies

Religious Rituals not always good for believers in them

2007-01-05T01:21:06Z

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/this_is_your_body_on_religion.php

Religious ritual can make you very, very sick, and even kill you. This somewhat morbid, mildly gross, and terribly sad story about the Essenes, the religious zealots who authored the Dead Sea scrolls, is an interesting anthropological look at an ancient failed cult.

It seems that their requirements for dealing with their own waste were mistakenly ineffective. They excreted into pits that protected parasites, which they would then carry back…and before they could return to the group, they had to bathe by total immersion in a cistern, which meant they'd basically soak in each other's infestations.

The ritual cleansing "is a total immersion, which means that it gets in your ears, in your eyes and in your mouth," Zias said. "It is not hard to imagine how sick everyone must have been."

The sickness is reflected in the Qumran cemetery, which had been partially excavated previously.

"The graveyard at Qumran is the unhealthiest group I have ever studied in over 30 years," Zias said.

Fewer than 6% of the men buried there survived to age 40, he said. In contrast, cemeteries from the same period excavated at Jericho show that half the men lived beyond age 40.

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 3 replies

Since it is Christmas, the Day Santa was born...

2006-12-23T02:34:37Z

Just kidding.

Actually, I just thought this would be interesting and, well, kind of Christmas-themed: There is a very interesting book out called Reindeer People, by Piers Vitebsky, which looks at indigenous Siberian peoples who utilize the reindeer for transport, and whose relationship to the reindeer is not only pragmatic but quite profound and spiritual.

In fact, a lot of Siberian folklore includes reindeer, who act as mediators between the realm of the physical and that of spirit. In a way the reindeer is thought to embody man's ability to transcend this reality and to attain the greater reality of spirit world. For that reason the reindeer is often depicted as flying, in carvings, paintings and even tattoos. Some such pictures portray the animal as having tiny wings on its horns; others show it holding the sun and moon in its antlers.

Makes you wonder a little about Santa’s flying reindeer and the origin of that old fable.

Anyhow, I simply found these beliefs and practices to be seasonally appropriate, interesting, and quite lovely, and thought I would share them with you. I recommend the book; it is quite lengthy but very good.

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply

World's religions rooted in Sun worship?

2006-10-31T19:51:56Z

http://bblc.tv/rebels.htm

Episode 7: Are the world's religions rooted in Sun worship?

Interesting video interview.

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 30 replies

Belief Systems?

2006-10-27T20:52:34Z

In the month of May I was invited to give a presentation to a class on the philosophy of belief at a local community college. It was a two hour session, one for presenting the topic and the last for answering questions. The thing that surprised me was that at the third term level the students hadn't been exposed to "Occam's Razor". Simply stated, When two or more concepts are involved the simplest one that fits the known facts is probably the best.

Are we ready to apply this test when it comes to religion?

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 18 replies

Help Save Tara!

2006-08-20T22:51:57Z

Please help save Tara (Irelands most sacred place) by signing the worldwide petition at the link below and stop them from building the Motorway through Tara. All info is in the petition. Be sure to cut & paste this petition on all your Pagan groups & Forums. get your Covens & Groves to sign it. This is very important! PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS SIGN! Thank You!

http://www.petitiononline.com/hilltara/petition.html

go na Tiarna agus Bantiarn coill glas beannacht glas tu!
(Irish Gaelic for)
May the Lord and Lady of the Green Wood Bless you!

/|\ Gypsy /|\

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

Toasting Political Christians

2006-06-21T20:35:19Z

tribes » Religion & Beliefs » Aleister Crowley » topics »
Toasting Political Christianstopic posted Sat, June 10, 2006 - 4:03 PM by PuckerButt delete entire topic

Advertisement
Here's to The Moral Majority,
Apostles of Hatred and Fear:
As I watched Jerry Fallwell on TV last night,
I new that the Anti-Christ was here.

The Golden Rule he has turned into Lead:
Now it only reads "Do Unto Others".
He wants to insure we have Crosses to bear
And supports laws to repress his Brothers.

His Dogma oozed out like Puss from Christ's Wounds
Reeking of Bigotry and Malice.
I'm certain his Holy Rituals produce
Vomit From Wine in his Chalice.
posted by:
PuckerButt
Seattle
16 friends

reply to this post
HOLDEN
646 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansSat, June 10, 2006 - 4:26 PM
clap clap clap clap clap! :)
reply to this post

Marvin
136 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansSat, June 10, 2006 - 4:28 PM
You go Mr PuckerButt!!! Agreed! I have one thing to say to that fat fuckin bass turd! "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKIN FUCK!!! Jimmy Swaggart too. lol I can't believe these people still exist!
reply to this post

Mist...
335 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansSat, June 10, 2006 - 5:40 PM
nice.
reply to this post

Gruf...
16 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansSat, June 10, 2006 - 10:49 PM
Don't forget your balance...what would your night be without their day- never cease the fight as well.
reply to this post

Pils...
150 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansSun, June 11, 2006 - 9:17 AM
The moral majority? I really can't think slow enough to understand those
sheeple. Remember when Pat Robertson said " god " told him to run for president? What an arse ! They should pitch in their bibles and become comedians !
reply to this post

Kwis...
20 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansSun, June 11, 2006 - 5:02 PM
They terrify me. It frightens me that every politician that can realistically expect to be elected to Federal Office must kiss their asses.
reply to this post

Ali
22 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansMon, June 12, 2006 - 12:39 PM
come on....

what do you expect talentless fear-mongerering wankers to do?
reply to this post

HOLDEN
646 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansMon, June 12, 2006 - 3:59 PM
wouldn't it be refreshing if someone running for president, when asked to say something about "faith" (euphemism for religion) replied : "NO! i'm not seeking to become a clergymember. i'm seeking public office in a goverment that at least theoretically is secular & tries to maintain something called separation of church & state, therefor i'll KEEP MY TRAP SHUT about religion in my public statements.....& I CHALLENGE MY COMPETITORS TO DO LIKEWISE!!"
reply to this post

James
123 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansMon, June 12, 2006 - 5:33 PM
they provide a counter current....for the new aeon's consciousness to push away from...

we all play our roles...i just i thank god (well...you know what I mean)...that i didn't have to play the christian role again...in this lifetime. i didn't quite work out so well last time....

we all play them all.....in the long run....

93james
reply to this post

This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Marvin
136 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 7:12 PM
www.thegodmovie.com/

Anyone seen this movie yet?
reply to this post

Gruf...
16 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 8:05 PM
hogwash.
reply to this post

Marvin
136 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 8:15 PM
? I havent seen it. I thought it appears to debunk Christian myths?
reply to this post

James
123 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 8:58 PM
looks trippy :)

gonna see if it's on netflix...
reply to this post

James
123 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 9:00 PM
just cued it up on netflix......
reply to this post

Marvin
136 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 9:02 PM
www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay <--------The God Who Wasnt There link on Netflix : ) Thanks for the idea. I have Netflix and am gonna put it on the 1st of my list not. I didnt even think of this till you mentioned it. Woo hoo!!!
reply to this post

Marvin
136 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 9:06 PM
I dont know why I typed "not". I put it on my list. Some of the Netflix revies look promising.
reply to this post

Minouck
24 Re: Toasting Political ChristiansWed, June 14, 2006 - 10:27 PM
Sounds an interesting documentary, I'll have to check it out.
reply to this post

James
123 new post
Re: Toasting Political ChristiansToday, 9:48 AM
just watched the documentary (the God Who Wasn't There) and I thought it was hilarious! it has a Micheal Moore feel to it....and some very funny clips

it brought up some very good points and a lot of information that I had never heard before. you guys should check it out...
reply to this post

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

New KId

2006-06-21T16:00:11Z

Hello everyone. As the Eagles once sang, "there's a new kid in town." My name is Dan, and my interest in religious/cultural archaeology is an ongoing and deeply rooted passion. I look forward to reading and contributing to the board.--Dan

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

Ethnographic Video

2006-05-09T09:11:39Z

The Spirit of Truth - "The O.G. Post!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jIWWFBvs7A&search=public%20truth

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply

Lumerian "Mu" Origin of Man... First Religion.

2006-05-09T03:41:52Z

For more on the origin of religion check out my posts on the tribe "The School of Universal Truth" I've posted some direct excerpts from the book that dates religion all the way back to one people one tribe and analyzes the symbols and how they travelled and evolved through the forming of new religions... Also pre-dates most that we know by 25,000 years...

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 12 replies

Religious Studies programmes

2006-04-14T22:24:30Z

Does anybody know of any good Religious Studies departments anywhere in the world with a progressive/applied approach to research?

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply

My new tribe

2006-03-30T22:29:22Z

Greetings everyone,
I have many varied interests as I'm sure all of you do as well. Because of a few of my interests I've started a tribe that will focus on African Traditional Religions. I want this to be a place where we can discuss the similarities of all African Traditional Religions. If you think that's something you might be interested in please join and participate. Right now we're starting an activity that might be a fun way to get to know each other. Come on by when you get a chance. http://tribes.tribe.net/africantraditionalreligions

PEACE/LIGHT/LOVE
sadio

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

Excuses, Excuses...

2005-11-18T02:27:47Z

Hi everyone. I am writing this for my other tribe and my mailing list as well. I am sorry if I haven't been very attentive, but everyone else seems to be keeping the list going(this is good). I created this tribe for other people anyway, not just myself. I am just exhausted lately.
Have been working overtime at work, (will be doing so again tomorrow), have been giving plasma(which has been knocking me out for hours, after I donate, fall into a deep sleep, much like a rock) and I have an interview for a second job tomorrow night, to go to in the evenings. So I may be even more tired, but only for the next month or so. I appreciate you all being a part of my tribes and mailing list though. I really like everyone that participates in all of my groups.

Thanks,

Lilith Gigipah/Tammy

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply

Phyllis Boswell Moore

2005-11-18T01:47:42Z

Phyllis Boswell Moore (deceased wife of Thomas M. Moore) wrote a stunning book called "No Other Gods: An Interpretation of the Biblical Myth for a Transbiblical Age."

I am wondering whether anyone else has read it.

It is one of the most lucid and convincing books of its kind that I have ever read. It not only looks back on the history and anthroplogy of religion, but it also looks forward. "Foreground" interpretations are made against a "background" of synchronistic unfoldings. Although the author's intellect was rightly described as "adamantine" and "razor keen" by the psychiatrist Murray Stein, the author was never gratuitously "heady." The question she kept before her was as relevant as anything could possibly be: Given the unfoldings of the past, where are we going in the future?

Without going into detail regarding content, these are some, but not all, of the chapter headings:

The Evolution of the Biblical God
Psychic Anatomy: Ego and Self
Ego and the Archetypal Masculine
Logos and Phallos
Yahweh and Zeus
The Turning Point: Satan and Job
The Rest of the Mythic Personality
The Satanic Shadow
The Persona of the Father
Androgyny
The Great Chain of Being
The New Sciences
The Religious Writings of CG Jung
The Larger Schema
The Smaller Schema
Answer to Job
Jahweh and the Mind of Man
The Role of Islam
A Jungian Hermeneutic
Gnosticism
The Gnostic Critique
Gnostic Feminism
Conclusion

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply

New Moderator for this list

2005-10-22T17:16:57Z

I am going to be leaving Tribe. I was just wondering if anyone wants to take over my list I am not sure how we handle that, but if you are interested, let me know. I am giving it a day then I am deleting my profile.

Tammy/Lilith

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 0 replies

'The Bible Geek'

2005-09-21T21:05:22Z

Dr. Robert Price isn't a theist, but he loves the Bible. In fact he loves it so much, he attends church! This new show is truly all about anyone interested in the Bible and world religions. Bob believes that we can solve Bible puzzles by the use of criticism, not attacking the Bible. Bob wants to understand the Bible, and it will become clear that a love for this understanding is almost always hampered by biblical literalists.

Dr. Price knows more about the various theories of how the bible came to be than anyone I have ever heard. He's written half a dozen books on the subject.

Link to the audio feed of the radio show:
http://www.infidelguy.com/demo/infidelguy.com_The_Bible_Geek_Ep1.mp3

Audio is from the Infidel Guy's radio broadcast:
http://www.infidelguy.com/index.html

posted in Anthropology Of Religion - 1 reply