Physicists may soon confirm the actual existence of the Higgs boson or God particle. It must exist or their models don’t work and the math is all wrong, which can’t possibly be the case. Or perhaps it can. Stranger things have happened. The elusiveness of the God particle, which is needed for mass to exist, [...]
Tags:conformity·Emile Durkheim·God particle·Higgs boson·moral order·network analysis·religiosity·religiosity effects·Rodney Stark·sociology
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber sought to correct or temper Karl Marx’s view that religion was always a reflection or epiphenomenon of the economic base. Although Marx’s understanding of religion was considerably more complicated and drew heavily on Ludwig Feuerbach’s idealist critique in The Essence of Christianity (1841), [...]
Tags:Calvinism·Christianity·evil·Friedrich Nietzsche·good·history of science·India·Iran·Islam·Judaism·Karl Marx·Ludwig Feuerbach·Max Weber·modernity·monotheism·Muslim·Parsis·Persia·profane·Protestant Ethic·Puritans·Robert Kennedy·Robert Merton·Rodney Stark·sacred·spirit of capitalism·truth·Zoroaster·Zoroastrianism
Over at the Evolution of Religion Project, Dominic Johnson comments on the first target article which will appear in what promises to be a fantastic new journal, Religion, Brain, and Behavior. Because the first issue has yet to be published, I will have to rely on Johnson’s summary:
Jeff Schloss and Michael Murray have written a [...]
Tags:Abrahamic faiths·Abrahamic God·adaptionist·biological evolution·Christianity·cooperation enhancement·cultural evolution·Dominic Johnson·Islam·Jeff Schloss·Judaism·Michael Murray·moral order·moralizing gods·nationalism·punishing gods·punishment avoidance·Religion Brain and Behavior·Rodney Stark·supernatural agents·supernatural punishment·supernatural punishment theory·unified theory
The BBC’s Jason Palmer breathlessly reports on a new study which suggests that “religion may go extinct” in nine nations (Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland). This is a classic case of what is known in accounting of “garbage in, garbage out” or GIGO.
The study authors relied on census [...]
Tags:atheism·Daniel Abrams·formal religion·informal religion·Jason Palmer·religiosity·religious affiliation·Rodney Stark·secularization thesis
As I noted in A Tale of Two Religion Scholars, Dr. Michael Blume’s research (which you can find at Homo religious) shows that religious groups out-reproduce their secular counterparts. The data are solid and correspond to the commandments of most religions: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Given that religious people make more babies than secular people, Blume [...]
Tags:agnosticism·atheism·carrying capacity·confirmation bias·Darwin·extended lactation·fertility·fitness benefits·Freud·group level selection·group size·ideological causation·infanticide·John Hawks·Marx·Michael Blume·Nietzsche·Paleolithic shamanism·religious·reproduction·Rodney Stark·secular·secularism
Incredibly, there are three articles over at HuffPo Religion that I have recently bookmarked for brief discussion here. There are of course about ten others which reflect the liberal, progressive, ecumenical, and mystical view of religion adhered to by a tiny minority of people, and which will be of interest mostly to the highly educated [...]
Tags:Buddhist history·Christianity as state religion·Constantine·Constantine's conversion·Darwinism and the Moral Argument for God·Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche·early Christianity·empire·evolved morality·foragers·Fran de Waal·hunter-gatherers·Is Buddhism a Religion·Marc Hauser·Michael Ruse·moral code·morality·natural morality·non-religious morality·Paul Wagler·primates·privatization of religious belief·proto-morality·Rodney Stark·secular·Siddhartha·Talal Asad·westernized Buddhism
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are a fascinating group and highly successful in growing their membership. For those who don’t know much about them, I recommend Rodney Stark’s and Laurence Iannaccone’s article “Why the Jehovah’s Witnesses Grow So Rapidly: A Theoretical Application.” The article contains a concise history of the Witnesses, and then attempts to explain their [...]
Tags:Billy Graham·Christopher Hitchens·Dale Carnegie·Ecce Homo·Jehovah's Witnesses·Joel Meares·Joel Osteen·Laurence Iannaccone·Nathan Heller·Nikos Kazantzakis·Oral Roberts·religious publishing·Richard Dawkins·Rick Warren·Rodney Stark·Sam Harris·The Last Temptation of Christ·The Shack·The Watchtower·William Young
Over at the New Humanist, Tom Rees has posted a nice article asking “Who Needs God?” and “Why is religion on the rise in so many countries?” The frame for Rees’ commentary is modernization theory, which claimed that as countries developed and became more “modern,” religion would decline and people would become more secular.
As Rees [...]
Tags:American religiosity·cognitive science of religion·Karl Giberson·modernization·Rodney Stark·secularization·Sigmund Freud·Tom Rees
Many of the recent books and articles about the evolutionary origins of religion claim that natural selection targeted “moral” behaviors and that these behaviors coalesced into “religion.” This is a story told primarily by group level selectionists (who have the bad habit of confusing biological evolution with something they call “cultural evolution”) and evolutionary psychologists [...]
Tags:David Sloan Wilson·Edward Tylor·Frans de Waal·Marc Hauser·Matt Rossano·morality·morals·Nicholas Wade·Rodney Stark·shamanism
