Anitra
March 19th 2004, 04:21 PM
He does not explain all of it to everybody's satisfaction, but I found Pascal Boyer's book Religion Explained to be very thought-provoking. Those who believe in a revelatory religion may just find it provoking. :-D Boyer's book studies the origin and transmission of religious ideas as human phenomena, using the tools of ethnology and cognitive science.
One of my main reasons for recommending the book far and wide is that it provides an excellent overview of the wide variety of religious idea in the world, which is a good corrective for the general culture-centric view of Americans. Most people I talk to have a disconcerting way of assuming that you are talking about one thing and one thing only when you use the word "god", and that is a being omnipotent.omniscient.omnibenevolent.omnipresent.both.immanent.and.transcendent.self-existent.uncreated.creator.of.all.things.has.no.beginning.and.will.have.no.end -- that no matter which god you say is that god, that's the definition of being a god.
Boyer not only demonstrates that there are many other conceptions of "god" in human culture, he doesn't even credit that one with having any real psychological or cultural reality outside of academic theology. He cites some interesting psychological demonstrations of what people *actually* believe, the God they relate to in daily life.
Boyer's main thesis is that the concept of personal gods is universally prevalent simply because human brains are most likely to think of things in anthropomorphic terms. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize *everything*, including the copier that breaks during an urgent project. The reason we anthropomorphize is because of all the things that affect a human organism's survival, people and relationships affect it the most, therefore we have more mental circuitry to deal with people and relationships than anything else in our heads. The first object in the environment that a newborn can recognize is the human face; we can read emotion long before we can interpret any other information. It is just natural for us to think of religious ideas in the form of persons and relationships.
Other anthropologists have observed that death rituals seem to mark the beginnings of "acting human," and of "religion." Boyer also theorizes that dealing with death is the primary basis of developing religion; but it is not our personal death we develop religion to deal with. Cognitively, the death of someone we know, especially a loved one, is a disrupting thing to deal with. The body that was once a loved one to embrace is now a carcass, source of disease and corruption, triggering entirely different emotional associations -- while in our memories that person is still alive, still triggering the emotional associations of life. We construct rituals in order to make the transition of relating to a person as physically alive among us to relating to them in a different way. One of the common ways is to think of them as continuing to exist, but "unbodied," separate from the physical body, which we can now detach our emotional associations from and bury-burn-or-whatever.
The book was useful to me, as a theist, to examine my own subjective sense of God as a personal presence and question it as a psychological projection from a mind simply geared to think in terms of persons and relationships. It did not destroy my faih in God, but it certainly helped mature it. It was also interesting in a lot of other ways. I have long been fascinated with evolutionary psychology, and believe it holds a lot more promise in explaining ourselves to ourselves than either traditional religion or other schools of psychology do.
I recommend the book. It's not that thick a book, either. And Boyer is an excellently clear and enjoyable writer.
One of my main reasons for recommending the book far and wide is that it provides an excellent overview of the wide variety of religious idea in the world, which is a good corrective for the general culture-centric view of Americans. Most people I talk to have a disconcerting way of assuming that you are talking about one thing and one thing only when you use the word "god", and that is a being omnipotent.omniscient.omnibenevolent.omnipresent.both.immanent.and.transcendent.self-existent.uncreated.creator.of.all.things.has.no.beginning.and.will.have.no.end -- that no matter which god you say is that god, that's the definition of being a god.
Boyer not only demonstrates that there are many other conceptions of "god" in human culture, he doesn't even credit that one with having any real psychological or cultural reality outside of academic theology. He cites some interesting psychological demonstrations of what people *actually* believe, the God they relate to in daily life.
Boyer's main thesis is that the concept of personal gods is universally prevalent simply because human brains are most likely to think of things in anthropomorphic terms. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize *everything*, including the copier that breaks during an urgent project. The reason we anthropomorphize is because of all the things that affect a human organism's survival, people and relationships affect it the most, therefore we have more mental circuitry to deal with people and relationships than anything else in our heads. The first object in the environment that a newborn can recognize is the human face; we can read emotion long before we can interpret any other information. It is just natural for us to think of religious ideas in the form of persons and relationships.
Other anthropologists have observed that death rituals seem to mark the beginnings of "acting human," and of "religion." Boyer also theorizes that dealing with death is the primary basis of developing religion; but it is not our personal death we develop religion to deal with. Cognitively, the death of someone we know, especially a loved one, is a disrupting thing to deal with. The body that was once a loved one to embrace is now a carcass, source of disease and corruption, triggering entirely different emotional associations -- while in our memories that person is still alive, still triggering the emotional associations of life. We construct rituals in order to make the transition of relating to a person as physically alive among us to relating to them in a different way. One of the common ways is to think of them as continuing to exist, but "unbodied," separate from the physical body, which we can now detach our emotional associations from and bury-burn-or-whatever.
The book was useful to me, as a theist, to examine my own subjective sense of God as a personal presence and question it as a psychological projection from a mind simply geared to think in terms of persons and relationships. It did not destroy my faih in God, but it certainly helped mature it. It was also interesting in a lot of other ways. I have long been fascinated with evolutionary psychology, and believe it holds a lot more promise in explaining ourselves to ourselves than either traditional religion or other schools of psychology do.
I recommend the book. It's not that thick a book, either. And Boyer is an excellently clear and enjoyable writer.