The person who lives inside your head may seem rational and honest, but who is fooling who? If you are fortunate there is only one voice and if you are sober the voice should be sensible. Or so we would like to think. Two recent studies suggest otherwise. As it turns out, our homunculi are [...]
Tags:Christoph Korn·cognitive dissonance·error coding·homunculus·information bias·lying·Nietzsche·Raymond Dolan·Robert Trivers·self deception·self-deceit·Tali Sharot·truth claims·unrealistic optimism·untruth as condition of life·William von Hippel
There was a time when Paleolithic cave paintings were construed primarily through the lens of “art,” an interpretive stance which assumes that at least some Paleolithic peoples were “artists” who painted for pleasure. Because this lens is so subjective (and creative), all manner of interpretations were offered. Whether prosaic or fanciful, this approach raised troubling [...]
Tags:altered states of consciousness·art history·ASC·cave art·cave paintings·dark zone art·David Lewis-Williams·doodles·entoptics·flutings·form constants·France·functionalism·hallucination·Jessica Cooney·Kevin Sharpe·Leslie Van Gelder·Paleolithic·petroglyphs·play·ritual·Rouffignac·shamans·symbolism
Making and keeping promises is a hallmark of human behavior that many consider to be a cornerstone of “morality.” As such, it is often linked to religion. The linkage is expressly acknowledged by religious groups such as Promise Keepers.
Until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to promises per se or their critical importance to the [...]
Tags:conscience·consciousness·Friedrich Nietzsche·Genealogy of Morals·Making Sense of Nietzsche·memory·memory activation·morality·morals·Promise Keepers·promises·Richard Schacht
The notion of binaries or opposites is deeply entrenched in Western culture and thought. Although it seems perfectly natural to perceive and categorize the world in terms of dichotomies (black-white, either-or), what seems natural is actually learned. Our teacher in this regard is Aristotle, who was so impressed by the Pythagorean Table of Opposites that [...]
Tags:Aborigines·Aristotle·binary·consciousness·David Lewis-Williams·dichotomy·dreams·Dreamtime·hypnagogia·Inside the Neolithic Mind·Lee Irwin·logic·Native American·Plains Indians·rationalism·Table of Opposites·unconsciousness·vision quest·visions
Several years ago I read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). It wasn’t easy. This is not because Dennett’s ideas and arguments are difficult (they aren’t). It is because I don’t care for Dennett’s style. While I can overlook stylistic deficiencies if the substance is solid, in this case I [...]
Tags:analogy·Armin Geertz·atheism·biological evolution·Breaking the Spell·cultural evolution·Daniel Dennett·Daniel Hart·Darwinian monism·David Sloan Wilson·E.O. Wilson·Leon Wieseltier·memes·meta-theory·metaphor·skepticism·Snark·The God Genome·theory of everything
A friend recently pointed me to Michael Graziano’s article “Is Spirituality a Byproduct of Evolution?” Because it is posted over at Huff or Fluff-Po, I was immediately skeptical.
Anyone who has perused Fluff-Po’s Religion section knows it is filled scientific sounding metaphysics and countless articles by progressive religionists telling us that their non-progressive counterparts have gotten [...]
Tags:Antonio Damasio·awe·byproduct·emotion·feeling·hierarchy·Matt Rossano·Michael Graziano·neuroscience·ranking·sociality·spirituality
Over at the Guardian, Andrew Brown asks if we should clone Neanderthals (assuming it could be done). For me, the easy answer is no.
Brown then asks a series of nonsensical questions which imply that because Neanderthal brains were different from human brains (Neanderthals in fact had bigger brains than humans; the difference is in shape), [...]
Tags:acculturation·Andrew Brown·Anglican·Buddhist·Christian·cloned Neanderthal·cloning·culture·enculturation·heresy·heretics·Hindu·monotheism·Muslim·myth·Neandertal·religious exclusivism·religious pluralism·Richard Dawkins·ritual form·shamanic·shamanisms·social construction·Upper Paleolithic
In 1977, Stephen King published his short story “Children of the Corn” in Penthouse. Seven years later, movie audiences across the nation were horrified by the ritual doings of small town Nebraska kids who worshiped something malevolent in the corn.
It surely was no coincidence that later in the year, Nebraska experienced a sharp drop in [...]
Tags:agriculture·arousal·Aztecs·Children of the Corn·crucifixion·Daily Mass·doctrinal·Engels·episodic·Gatlin·Harvey Whitehouse·HRAF·imagistic·intensity·Linda Hamilton·Marx·memory·modes of religiosity·morphospace·Nebraska·neolithic·pagan·political economy·Quentin Atkinson·ritual form·Salah·Sarah Connor·scythe·semantic·Stephen King·Sun Dance·vision quest
Imagine you are dining at a friend’s home. Your host is excited because she has prepared a special dish for you. When dinner is finally served, you are surprised to see a whole egg on your plate and when you open the egg, you are even more surprised to see this:
That’s balut, a dish of [...]
Tags:ablution·atheism·aversion·balut·cleansing·contagion·disease·disgust·Erika Salomon·fairness·filth·germs·Gross Gods·Icky Atheism·ingroups·Jesse Preston·Koran·outgroups·pollution·priming·Quran·Richard Dawkins·Ryan Ritter·The God Delusion
There is no shortage of research projects whose aim is to “explain religion” or the “evolution of religion.” In addition to the Evolution of Religion Project which I interrogated in a recent post, anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse leads the “Explaining Religion” project based at Oxford University.
Whitehouse is interested primarily in religious variation and sees religions as [...]
Tags:doctrinal·episodic memory·Explaining Religion Project·Harvey Whitehouse·imagistic·modes of religiosity·Neolithic·Oxford·political economy·religious transmission·religious variation·ritual forms·semantic memory·shamanic
