Genealogy of Religion

Exploring the Origins, History and Future of Religion

Entries Tagged as 'Arabs'

Religious Evolution: Sami Sticks & Phoenician Stones

May 28th, 2011 · No Comments · Classifications, Cultural Evolution, History, Hunter-Gatherers, Pagans, Ritual, Shamanism

Unlike living organisms, cultural formations do not “evolve.” Evolution, sensu stricto, is a biological process and not a cultural one. Despite this fact, some scholars have fruitfully deployed evolutionary ideas — as analogy and metaphor — to analyze cultural history.
In 1964 the sociologist Robert Bellah did just this in his classic paper, Religious Evolution. Taking [...]

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German Angst and Islam

September 13th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Axial Age, Power

In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx famously observed that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”  Nowhere is this more true than in Germany, where the mass of history is heavy and sometimes suffocating.
With this in mind, the recent furor over Thilo [...]

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Religious Wars and Nationalism

July 18th, 2010 · No Comments · Cultural Evolution, Economy, Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, History, Power

Over at HuffPo Religion, Matt Rossano has written a thought provoking piece — which some may find surprising — on the relationship between war and religion.   In Why Religion Does Not Equal War, Rossano begins with the common knowledge that religious differences often lead to war, or that religious differences are often used to justify [...]

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