From: Ray Recchia (rrecchia@mail.clarityconnect.com)
Date: Sun 01 Jun 2003 - 13:34:33 GMT
At 12:46 AM 6/1/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Perhaps this book has been mentioned here before, but I don't see any sign
>of it.
>
>I am in the process of reading it right now. There are a bunch of reviews
>of the book, a good fraction of them scathing, a few like this. It is a
>work most congenial to memetics.
>
>Keith Henson
>
>Across the globe and throughout history, human beings have engaged in a
>variety of religious practices and have held a diversity of religious
>beliefs. These phenomena have been explained in a variety of different
>ways by anthropologists, psychologists, and other scholars, as well as by
>religious practitioners themselves, with varying degrees of success.
>Perhaps more puzzling, and just in need of an explanation, is the fact
>that human beings have religion in the first place. According to Boyer, it
>is only now, with recent contributions of the cognitive and neural
>sciences and evolutionary biology to the understanding of the nature and
>origins of the human mind, that we are in position to successfully provide
>such an explanation. Religion Explained attempts just such an explanation,
>drawing on cutting edge research in a variety fields and Boyer's own
>fieldwork experience. Religion, Boyer suggests, is a by-product of the way
>our minds evolved to negotiate the natural and, more importantly, the
>social world. Boyer's naturalistic and cognitivist approach is at variance
>with many established traditions in the study of the religion and his
>approach may seem wrong-headed to many. Be that as it may, he has produced
>a challenging and thought-provoking book, containing many insights that
>transcend what some might see as the limitations of his approach.
Sounds like a good companion piece to "Darwin's Cathedral".
Incidently, here's a link to a program David Sloan Wilson is offering in
the fall at the university near where I work.
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~evostuds/grad.htm I think I might audit it.
Ray Recchia
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