Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500770433
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
A controversial exploration of the origin of religion in the neurology of the human brain. In this book the noted cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams confronts a question that troubles many people in the world today: Is there a supernatural realm that intervenes in the material world of daily life and leads to the evolution of religions? Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about them, and thus creeds are born. Forty thousand years ago, people were leaving traces in the archaeological record of activities that we can label religious, and Lewis-Williams discusses in detail the evidence preserved in the Volp Caves in France. He also shows that mental imagery produced by the functioning of the human brain can be detected in widely separated religious communities such as Hildegard of Bingen’s in medieval Europe or the San hunters of southern Africa.
Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781322671130
Category : Evolution
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: David Lewis-williams
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 050005164X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A controversial exploration of the origin of religion in the neurology of the human brain. In this book the noted cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams confronts a question that troubles many people in the world today: Is there a supernatural realm that intervenes in the material world of daily life and leads to the evolution of religions? Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about them, and thus creeds are born. Forty thousand years ago, people were leaving traces in the archaeological record of activities that we can label religious, and Lewis-Williams discusses in detail the evidence preserved in the Volp Caves in France. He also shows that mental imagery produced by the functioning of the human brain can be detected in widely separated religious communities such as Hildegard of Bingen’s in medieval Europe or the San hunters of southern Africa.
Author: F. LeRon Shults
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360956
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?
Author: J. Anderson Thomson
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA)
ISBN: 0984493239
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 91
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking volume, J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, with Clare Aukofer, offers a succinct yet comprehensive study of how and why the human mind generates religious belief. Dr. Thomson, a highly respected practicing psychiatrist with credentials in forensic psychiatry and evolutionary psychology, methodically investigates the components and causes of religious belief in the same way any scientist would investigate the movement of astronomical bodies or the evolution of life over time—that is, as a purely natural phenomenon. Providing compelling evidence from psychology, the cognitive neurosciences, and related fields, he, with Ms. Aukofer, presents an easily accessible and exceptionally convincing case that god(s) were created by man—not vice versa. With this slim volume, Dr. Thomson establishes himself as a must-read thinker and leading voice on the primacy of reason and science over superstition and religion.
Author: Tim Bayne
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198754965
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Philosophy of religion contains some of our most burning questions about the role of religion in the world, and the relationship between believers and God. Tim Bayne considers the core debates surrounding the concept of God; the relationship between faith and reason; and the problem of evil, before looking at reincarnation and the afterlife.
Author: Fraser Watts
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199688087
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This evolutionary cognitive science of religion is concerned specifically with exploring the relationship between the evolution of the human mind, the evolution of culture in general, and the origins and subsequent development of religion. This volume brings together specialists from different disciplines to reflect on these questions.
Author: Armin W. Geertz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317544552
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
Attempts to understand the origins of humanity have raised fundamental questions about the complex relationship between cognition and culture. Central to the debates on origins is the role of religion, religious ritual and religious experience. What came first: individual religious (ecstatic) experiences, collective observances of transition situations, fear of death, ritual competence, magical coercion; mirror neurons or temporal lobe religiosity? Cognitive scientists are now providing us with important insights on phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes. Together with insights from the humanities and social sciences on the origins, development and maintenance of complex semiotic, social and cultural systems, a general picture of what is particularly human about humans could emerge. Reflections on the preconditions for symbolic and linguistic competence and practice are now within our grasp. Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture puts culture centre stage in the cognitive science of religion.
Author: Gregory J. Wightman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442242906
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
How did religion emerge—and why? What are the links between behavior, environment, and religiosity? Diving millions of years into the past, to a time when human ancestors began grappling with issues of safety, worth, identity, loss, power, and meaning in complex and difficult environments, GregoryJ. Wightman explores the significance of goal-directed action and the rise of material culture for the advent of religiosity and ritual. The book opens by tackling questions of cognitive evolution and group psychology, and how these ideas can integrate with archaeological evidence such as stone tools, shell beads, and graves. In turn, it focuses on how human ancestors engaged with their environments, how those engagements became routine, and how, eventually, certain routines took on a recognizably ritualistic flavor. Wightman also critically examines the very real constraints on drawing inferences about prehistoric belief systems solely from limited material residues. Nevertheless, Wightman argues that symbolic objects are not merely illustrative of religion, but also constitutive of it; in the continual dance between brain and behavior, between internal and external environments, lie the seeds of ritual and religion. Weaving together insights from archaeology; anthropology; cognitive and cultural neuroscience; history and philosophy of religions; and evolutionary, social, and developmental psychology, Wightman provides an intricate, evidence-based understanding of religion’s earliest origins.
Author: Martin Prozesky
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532665385
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Honest to Goodness proposes a new Christian presence that is free of dogmatism, exclusivism, and biblicism. It charts a way back to the spiritual and ethical revolution begun by Jesus of Nazareth, one that can make a vital difference to needless evils such as bigotry, environmental destruction, poverty, and violence. The book reveals the author's experience of living under, against, and after apartheid, insisting that a faith that does not confront this world's evils is no faith at all, but a dangerous betrayal of all that is good, beautiful, and true. Honest to Goodness unflinchingly identifies the grave moral shortcomings that are embedded in traditional Christian beliefs and practices, and proposes ways of transforming them into harmony with the divine goodness that the author discerns everywhere. Embracing a world of religious diversity, science, and creative philosophy, the book describes a new way of experiencing and expressing the divine. It defends faith by moving beyond both theism and atheism.
