Home > Work > Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
1 " Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions. "
― Pascal Boyer , Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
2 " Our inference systems may be there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent in normal human environments for hundred of thousands of years. "
3 " The journalistic cliché that this is the -information age- is misleading if it suggests that in the past, either recent or distant, we did not depend on information. "
4 " Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time. "
5 " There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. "
6 " Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole. "
7 " [T]he choice of human groupings for cultural comparisons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a political one. "
8 " ...the fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity. "
9 " Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune. "
10 " What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it! "
11 " If religion allays anxiety, it cures only a small part of the disease it creates. "
12 " People may have finely tuned coalitional capacities, but they do not necessarily have access to how these work. The cues that make some people appear reliable and others less so are computed in ways that often escape conscious attention. "
13 " ...coalitional dynamics would predict that whatever outsiders do is often little concern to fundamentalists. What matters is what other members of the group are likely to do. "
14 " To sum up, then, fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection. "
15 " That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious. "
16 " A common explanation is that we imagine person-like agents who rule our destinies because this produces a reassuring view of our existence and the world around us. We project human features onto nonhuman aspects of our world because that makes these aspects more familiar and therefore less frightening. "
