or a sect recruiting converts on the basis of these ideas. But I cheated
here, as you must have noticed. I listed familiar notions either from
Western traditions or from religions most people in the West are
familiar with. We all have at least some acquaintance with Buddhist
reincarnation (23), Haitian zombies (24) or people who pray in front of
statues (27). So it seems that our little experiment so far only shows one
thing: we find that a concept is a possible religious concept when we
already know it is a religious concept. That's true but not terribly
impressive.
However, I think our intuition is more powerful than that. Familiar-
ity is not really what makes the difference between good and bad con- [53]
cepts. Indeed, we can judge that some concepts are "promising candi-
dates" for religion even if we have never heard of them. Consider these:
(31) Some people suddenly disappear when they are really thirsty.
(32) There are invisible people around who only drink cologne. If
someone suddenly goes into a fit and screams for cologne, it is
because their body is being controlled by one of these invisible
people.
(33) Some people have an invisible organ in their stomachs. That organ
flies away at night when they're asleep. It attacks people and drinks
their blood.
(34) This wristwatch is special and will chime when it detects that your
enemies are plotting against you.
(35) Some ebony trees can recall conversations people hold in their
shade.
(36) This mountain over there (this one, not that one) eats food and
digests it. We give it food sacrifices every now and then, to make
sure it stays in good health.
(37) The river over there is our guardian. It will flow upstream if it
finds out that people have committed incest.
(38) The forest protects us. It gives us game if we sing to it.These sound like possible foundations of a religion even though
you are probably not aware of any society where they are taken seri-
ously. Indeed, for some of them that is not too surprising since I made
them up. The others are taken from actual religious systems. (You may
want to try and guess which. The solution is given in the following
pages.) I chose to make up some of these examples to emphasize the
point that the difference is not just between what is actually found in
WHATSUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARELIKE