The Many Functions of Religions
There is a long history of assessing — and attempting to explain — religion in a functional manner. Marx and Engels figured that the function of religion was to disguise the realities of the...
View ArticleNationalism as Religion
In a previous post, Religious Wars and Nationalism, I discussed two factors that play a major role in group cohesion. The first factor, which played a dominant role for the majority of human evolution,...
View ArticleHabermas and Religion
Several months ago, many of us were shocked when it appeared that Jurgen Habermas, one of the world’s leading philosophers and social theorists, set up a Twitter account and opened with this tweet:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Ray of Light on Stonehenge
If you have ever suffered through an episode of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel, you might believe that every megalithic structure in the world was constructed by extraterrestrials: Apparently...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Yoga as Religion
Over at aeon, Erik Davis has posted a fantastic piece that addresses the apparently simple question: Is yoga a religion? Your answer to this question will probably depend on what yoga is for you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Evolving San-Bushmen “Religion”
Scholars have long been fascinated by the quixotic idea that something like the primordial or original “religion” existed until recently among various groups of hunter-gatherers. For cultural...
View ArticleRational Human Sacrifice
Is there a “rational” explanation for human sacrifice? Of course there is; indeed, there are several, depending on which premises are used to construct the culturally relative concept of what counts as...
View ArticleSerpents and Symbols
Sooner or later the serpent will bite. This probabilistic reality was running through my head when I read that a snake-handling Pentecostal pastor from Kentucky had been bitten. This CNN story lede...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Evans-Pritchard’s “Theories of Primitive Religion”
With the publication of Paul Radin’s Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin (1937), nearly seventy years of intense evolutionary theorizing about religion had apparently come to an end. Why, then,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Constructing the “Social”
What do we mean by “social”? I will confess to having never given this important issue much thought, which I now realize is a serious mistake. I should have known better, given that half my research is...
View Article
