When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method. So far as I can tell, there are no hunter-gatherer or pre-Neolithic societies that had taboos against homosexuality. We can therefore trace the history of the [...]
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Anthropologists have often observed that various religious doctrines, taboos, practices, and rituals are linked to — and can be explained by — environmental factors or ecological imperatives. Cultural materialists, such as Marvin Harris and Michael Harner, in particular have unraveled puzzling or seemingly paradoxical religious practices (such as India’s sacred cow, the Jewish/Islamic taboo on [...]
