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Famous Robert N. Bellah Quotes

“Though normally the handshake simply confirmed the trustworthiness of an agreement, with perhaps an aura of divine protection, Attic grave reliefs suggest a further extension of the idea for they "show handshaking as a symbol of Faith at the parting between the dead and the living. Thus, handshaking was not only a sign of agreement among the living, but the gesture of trust and faith in the supreme departure." With us the handshake is hardly a conscious gesture, but nonetheless one does not expect to be attacked by someone with whom one has just shaken hands. A refusal of a proffered handshake, however, would make the ritual gesture conscious indeed: breaking the ritual raises ominous questions that would require an explanation.”

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Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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“Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic ‘mortgage’, as Voegelin called it, reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial ‘breakthrough’. Kings who ruled ‘by divine right’, are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a ‘higher power’. At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power. But one thing is certain: the issue never goes away.”

ReligionCommunitySacrificeSocietyEvolutionary PsychologyCognitionTheory Of Mind
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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“As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice -even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference.”

ReligionCommunitySacrificeSocietyEvolutionary PsychologyCognitionTheory Of Mind
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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