Religion

03 Oct 1994 12:02

I'm particularly interested in what one might call, with a nod towards Mr. Hume, the natural history of religion --- religion considered as an utterly mundane, human phenomenon, something invoking various mental and social processes, much like book-collecting, politics or protection rackets, all of which, in some ways, resemble it. The basic observations about the natural histories of religion are that (1) religion is nearly but not quite universal; (2) religions are not believed because they are true; (3) every religion is full of wishful thinking, and the more popular the strain, the more wishful it is, and the more anthropomorphic. (A brief explanation of (2): mainfestly at most one religion can be correct. Therefore most of them cannot be believed because they are true, because they are not. Supposing there is one which is true, the others cannot be believed because they are true. But even supposing there is a true faith, it is manifestly propagated by exactly the same mechanisms as all the false ones, so its truth is not the reason it is adhered to.)

Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion [But he seems to me to be wrong about religions being necessary to wide-spread social trust]
Justin L. Barrett, "Exploring the natural foundations of religion", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000): 29--34
Pascal Boyer, "Why Is Religion Natural?", Skeptical Inquirer (May 2004) [Online; popular summary of ch. 1 of his book on the explanation of religion, listed below]
Ernest Gellner, "Flux and Reflux in the Faiths of Men" in his Muslim Society
John B. Henderson, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns
David Hume
- The Natural History of Religion
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam [Has many excellent observations on the history of religions (natural and otherwise) which extend far beyond Islam]

Timothy Beal, Religion and Its Monsters
Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience
Pascal Boyer
- The Naturalness of Religious Ideas
- Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Jenny-Ann Brodin, "A Matter of Choice: A Micro-Level Study on how Swedish New Agers Choose their Religious Beliefs and Practices", Rationality and Society 15 (2003): 381--405
Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West
William R. Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism
Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religions Life [This notion that rituals instill concepts seems incredibly wrong-headed to me, if only because participating in a ritual demands a fair bit of cognitive, conceptual machinery. So it'll be just as well to get the idea from the original source. I've got some links to critical literature in Thought and Society.]
Richard K. Fenn, Beyond Idols: The Shape of a Secular Society
Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion [Blurb, ch. 1]
S. E. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory
Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual ["What happens in religious traditions when the nature of the ritual is questioned, but the practice of performing rituals is not itself abandoned? How is it that people can accomplish ritual successfully without belief, and even without attributing any meaning to it? This book draws on the authors' observations of such reactions among Jains in western India, and asks what they can tell us about ritual as a mode of human action. Most anthropologists have assumed that ritual is a special kind of happening. The authors argue that we should not define ritual as a distinct type of event but instead look at ritualization, which is a modification of action. What is distinctive about actions which are ritualized? This book proposes a new theory to analyse the qualities which ritualization gives to a wide and disparate range of actions and events. The authors reject the common view that ritual carries intrinsic meaning, and stress the reasons why participants may or may not give meaning to ritual acts. They draw on insights from the philosophy of action, cognitive psychology, and phenomenology, to explore the paradox that in ritual, actors both are and are not the authors of their acts. The book explores the implications for anthropology of this new theory of ritual, with discussions of the relation between texts and action, the importance of bodily experience in ritual enactment, and the sense of selfhood as it is affected by ritual."]
E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
I. M. Lewis, Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma
Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind
D. Jason Slone, Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't
Harvey Whitehouse
- Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity
- Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea ["For the past thirty years, adherents of the millenarian cult of the Pomio Kivung in Papua New Guinea have been awaiting the establishment of a period of supernatural bliss, heralded by the return of their ancestors bearing 'cargo'. The author of this book, Harvey Whitehouse, was taken for a reincarnated ancestor, and was thus able to observe the dynamics of the cult from within. From the stable mainstream of the cult, localized splinter groups periodically emerge, hoping to expedite the millennium; the core of this volume concerns the close study of one such group in two Baining villages. The two aspects of the cult studied here - on the one hand a large, uniform, and stable mainstream organization with a well-defined hierarchy demanding orthodoxy of views, and on the other hand a small-scale and temporary movement, emotional and innovative in its views - stand in sharp contrast one to the other, but are here seen as divergent modes of the same process, implemented in differing ways. This original theory of 'modes of religiosity' which Whitehouse here develops draws on recent findings in cognitive psychology to link styles of codification and cultural transmission to the political scale, structure, and ethos of religious communities."]