71102.pdf

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RELIGION EXPLAINED ...

Also by Pascal Boyer The Naturalness of Religious Ideas Tradition as Truth and Communication ...

RELIGION EXPLAINED THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT PASCALBOYER ...

Copyright © 2001 by Pascal Boyer Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in t ...

CONTENTS Acknowledgments VII [1] WHAT IS THE ORIGIN? 1 WHAT SUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARE LIKE 51 [3] THE KIND OF MIND IT TAKES 93 [ ...

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS That I should write this book was clear in the minds of my editors, Abel Gerschenfeld and Ravi Mirchandani, long ...

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1 WHAT IS THE ORIGIN? Aneighbor in the village tells me that I should protect myself against witches. Otherwise they could hit m ...

on the right hand side of a particular rock. But if I use a goat of a dif- ferent color or another rock, it will not work at all ...

ent people; some are religious and some are not. Also, obviously, beliefs are different in different places. Japanese Buddhists ...

understand why. Consider other examples of human capacities. All human beings can catch colds and remember different melodies. W ...

and sometimes imply that further work on this question is, if not alto- gether futile, at least certainly undemanding. If you sa ...

the way it is. So why bother with them? It is not my intent here to ridicule other people's ideas or show that anthropologists a ...

tors and witches and perform rituals to placate the former and restrain the latter. This does not happen in ChristianNorthern Ir ...

ers, just cannot understand metaphors. They are powerful but stupid. In many places in Africa it is quite polite when visiting f ...

You can have religion without having "a" religion. For Chris- tians, Jews or Muslims it is quite clear that one belongs to a rel ...

these things, we just notice and accept that they are around. Many people in the world would say the same about witches and ghos ...

another with such obvious logic that we may forget to check that each episode really occurred as described. So a good scenario m ...