Over at NPR, Alix Spiegel presents a stimulating piece (which you can listen to or read) that asks: Is Believing in God Evolutionarily Advantageous? It seems to me that framing the question in this way suggests certain answers, all of which are neatly ensconced within Western and modern understandings of what constitutes “religion.” The story’s [...]
Tags:Alix Spiegel·cognitive science of religion·cooperation·Dominic Johnson·ethics·evolution of religion·extended kinship·fictive kinship·Jesse Bering·kinship·morality·Plains Indians·punishment·religion as adaptation·religiosity·shamanism·shamanisms·supernatural agents·surveillance
In the beginning, I had some hope for the Huffington Post’s relatively new section devoted to religion. Here was a forum, I thought, where difficult questions could be asked and possible answers ventured. Not once, however, have I read a post which asks a tough question, which might include any of the following:
What is “religion”?
Why [...]
Tags:compassion·deities·demons·doctrines·ecumenical·educated·enlightened·ethics·exegesis·existential·Frank Schaeffer·fundamentalism·fuzzy·gods·hermeneutics·Huffington Post·HuffPo Religion·Jay Michaelson·liberal·literalism·love·meaning·morals·mystical·mysticism·myth·progressive·purpose·sophisticated·souls·spirits·syncretic·vague
There is a long history of assessing — and attempting to explain — religion in a functional manner. Marx and Engels figured that the function of religion was to disguise the realities of the underlying economic system and palliate the suffering of the laboring masses. Durkheim thought that the function of religion was to enable [...]
Tags:Civil Religion·Durkheim·Engels·ethics·Freud·function of religion·Marx·morals·Philip Goldberg·proximate cause·Robert Bellah·Thomas Hobbes·transcendence·ultimate cause
Because most modern religions are constructed around — and concern themselves with — moral or ethical behavior, the common (and mistaken) assumption is that morality and religion are inextricably linked and have always been linked. This simply is not the case. As I discussed in this post, there are many societies — past and present [...]
Tags:ethics·Hammurabi·Lakota·Luther Standing Bear·morality·morals·Phillip Goldberg·prosical·Rig Veda·Sam Harris·Sumerians·Ten Commandments·the Lakota way
According to a Pew Forum poll from 2007, 57% of Americans think it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. Research, however, does not support the belief that religious people are more “moral” than non-religious people. As Mark Chaves (2010:5) recently noted:
Decades of psychological research looking for behavioral consequences in intrinsic religiosity has [...]
Between 1500 BCE and 50 CE, a series of new religions appeared which were unlike any before. These religions were founded by sages or prophets who emphasized various forms of universal ethics and morality. These prophets or sages included Zoroaster, Confucius, Socrates-Plato, Siddhartha (Buddha), and Abraham. Because Christianity and Islam are rooted in the Abrahamic [...]
