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Why are humans obsessed with divine minds? What do gods know and what do they care about? What happens to us and our relationships when gods are involved? Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary, cultural, and applied anthropology, social psychology, religious studies, philosophy, technology, and cognitive and political sciences, The Minds of Gods probes these questions from a multitude of naturalistic perspectives. Each chapter offers brief intellectual histories of their topics, summarizes current cutting-edge questions in the field, and points to areas in need of attention from future researchers. Through an innovative theoretical framework that combines evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion, this book brings together otherwise disparate literatures to focus on a topic that has comprised a lasting, central obsession of our species.
The scientific study of religion has made significant advances in recent decades, explaining how the mind produces religious ideas, the motivations underlying religious behaviour, and the transmission of religious cultures within and across generations. In Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics, Purzycki and Sosis argue that further progress requires integration of isolated research findings on the various components - ritual, supernatural agent belief, myth, taboo, and so forth - that constitute religion. Religions, they contend, need to be understood as adaptive systems. Drawing from a wealth of ethnographic and experimental evidence, they situate religious systems within their local socioecological contexts, showing how religious culture adaptively responds to economic, environmental, and human health problems, as well as costly threats to cooperation and reproduction. Based in the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, Religion Evolving offers a holistic approach that attends to the complex, interacting features of religious systems.
An integrative exploration of the concept of beliefs and their applications as studied across the cognitive sciences.
"Over time, more psychologists have become contributors to cognitive science of religion (CSR), but when are they doing CSR and when are they doing psychology of religion? Does it matter? In this chapter, contemporary scientific reflections on notions of death and the afterlife are sketched to illustrate the subtle differences between CSR and psychology of religion. These kindred scientific approaches overlap considerably, but attention to their central differences will assist scholars in finding complementarity, thereby improving both schools of inquiry and their contributions to each other. After developing this thesis, this chapter introduces the organization and flow of the volume as a w...
The cognitive science of religion is an inherently heterogeneous subject, incorporating theory and data from anthropology, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of mind amongst other subjects. One increasingly influential area of research in this field 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 research has exerted a strong influence on many areas of religious studies over the last twenty years, but, for some, the so-called 'evolutionary cognitive science of religion' remains a deeply problematic enterprise. This book'...
The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion provides a comprehensive overview of the academic study of religion. Written by an international team of leading scholars, its fifty-one chapters are divided thematically into seven sections. The first section addresses five major conceptual aspects of research on religion. Part two surveys eleven main frameworks of analysis, interpretation, and explanation of religion. Reflecting recent turns in the humanities and social sciences, part three considers eight forms of the expression of religion. Part four provides a discussion of the ways societies and religions, or religious organizations, are shaped by different forms of allocation of resources. ...
Celebrating the contributions of Panayotis Pachis to the field, this book discusses the past, present, and future of the study of religion in antiquity and modernity. Panayotis Pachis has dedicated his celebrated career at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to the study of various aspects of ancient religions. The contents of this book reflect Pachis' conviction that the study of religious ideas and practices should be focused on three pillars: the study of history, the formulation and application of theoretical frameworks, and the utilization of traditional as well as innovative methodological tools. Chapters range from the scientific study of Roman-Graeco religions, cultural evolution, and neurocognitive theories in the history and study of religion, to a look at why we need an integrative approach to study religion, past and present.
No one likes a know-it-all, but everyone loves a girl with brains and heart. The Smart Girl's Guide to Polyamory is an intelligent and comprehensive guide to polyamory, open relationships, and other forms of alternative love, offering relationship advice radically different from anything you'll find on the magazine rack. This practical guidebook will help women break free of the mold of traditional monogamy, without the constraints of jealousy, possessiveness, insecurity, and competition. The Smart Girl's Guide to Polyamory incorporates interviews and real-world advice from women of all ages in nontraditional relationships, as well as exercises for building self-awareness, confidence in comm...
The book deals with current issues of the study of religion as an academic discipline, especially cognitive, anthropological and sociological research of religious thought and behaviour. Publikace pojednává o aktuálních problémech religionistiky jako akademické disciplíny, zejména pak o kognitivním, antropologickém a sociologickém výzkumu náboženského myšlení a chování.