Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“...religion is not philosophy. Philosophy is largely confined to ivory-tower seminar rooms, but religion can be found in nearly every living room -or just about anywhere else you might care to look. Religion is not just (or even primarily) an intellectual pursuit; it is emotional.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“If religion represents a supernaturalizing of social life, then we would expect that the gods we envision would reflect the social worlds we inhabit.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“The -natural- world included the -supernatural-, and religion (as we call it today) was simply the means by which that part of the social world was made accessible.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“People often find religion after grave personal suffering or tragedy. It was no different with our ancestors. The few humans who managed to survive this disaster did so by finding unprecedented ways to expand social cooperation.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“Religious ritual was essential to establishing and maintaining never-before-seen levels of social complexity. Furthermore, ritual behavior was the very mechanism by which we acquired our uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought. Thus, religious ritual made us human.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“The wealth of social rituals present among our primate cousins indicates that our hominin ancestors were preadapted for using ritual as a means of social bonding and could call upon a rich repertoire of them in their everyday lives.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“Religion is complicated- the emphasis here being on the verb -is-. Religion as we see it today is the product of many millennia of evolutionary history. Neither the Olympian pantheon nor the Roman magisterium was part of religion in our ancestral world. To understand religion as a cultural adaptation, we must understand what it was when it first emerged, and what kind of world it was born into.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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“Humans are designed not with a specific adaptive religious module, but instead with a mind prepared to engage in the myriad social/emotional/cognitive activities that fall under what we call -religion-.”

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Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

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