71102.pdf

AGENTS ARE RELEVANT TO MANY SYSTEMS Throughout the previous chapters I emphasized that notions of gods and ancestors are of prac ...

tem (you intuitively assume that people do not deliver the goods, as it were, unless theyget the payment) and a person-file syst ...

Does this get us anywhere nearer answering the question, Why do people believe all this? Yes. I think it is in fact more or less ...

In other words, what we know of cognitive functioning suggests that our common view of religious belief has things diametrically ...

So consider again the general statement that children are underde- veloped versions of adults. There are many situations in whic ...

beliefs have them because a lot of inferential work in the basement makes them apparently plausible. So my advice to religious p ...

The fact that people tend to adopt their parents' concepts (mean- ing, more broadly, the concepts used by many people around the ...

But the fact that we wantsome explanation does not guarantee that one is available. Indeed, I think this question is very likely ...

IMMOVABLE NATURAL FAILURE MEETS IRRESISTIBLE UNNATURAL SUCCESS To people in the West, the most familiar version of the question ...

the effect that religion makes the world "more beautiful" or "more meaningful," that it addresses "ultimate" questions. Another ...

progress is brought about by a very odd form of social interaction, in which some of our motivational systems (a desire to reduc ...

capable of novelty—in a word, more open. Many scenarios of cultural evolution give pride of place to this kind of cognitive brea ...

include evidence of totemic and anthropomorphic representations as well as chimeras. The archaeological evidence, then, supports ...

ones that jointly activate inference systems for agency, predation, death, morality, social exchange, etc. Only a small range of ...

FINAL PROGRESS BOX: THE FULL HISTORY OF ALL RELIGION (EVER) For eons, people naturally have talked about millions of exceedingly ...

challenge such stories. This also allows a further development, whereby people can combine their moral intuitions with the notio ...

ducing convincing messages from the counterintu- itive agents. These people will probably be consid- ered as having some special ...

behaviors have persisted for millennia, probably much longer, and dis- play similar themes the world over. These concepts just h ...

ones in essential cognitive functions. Even faith and belief seem to be simple by-products of the way concepts and inferences ar ...

FURTHER READINGS WHAT IS THE ORIGIN? To get a better view of the diversity of religion as actually prac- ticed by people around ...