religion and what is not. Here we have a difference between what we
guesscouldbe in some exotic religion and what could not.
However clear our intuitions, they leave many questions unan-
swered. We feel that one list is "bad" and another "better" but how do
we know? After all, intuitions are not always reliable. Perhaps there are
places where items from the first list are part of the local religion. Also,
intuitions give us no precise limits for the set of "good" candidates and
certainly no explanation of why some ideas seem better than others.
So why use intuitions at all? The point of this rather unscientific
experiment is that when we have relatively stable intuitions about what
[54] is "all right" and what is not, it is often because we are using rules
without necessarily being aware of them. English speakers may have
the intuition that a sentence is wrong without being able to explain
why (compare for instance "Who did you see John with?" and "Who
did you see John and?"). So intuitions are valuable as a starting point
in a more serious investigation. We can use religious concepts this way
too. We have intuitions about which ones are good because they are
built according to particular mental recipes.If we understand what
these recipes are, what ingredients are put together and how they are
processed, we will understand why some types of concepts are found
in so many religious traditions and others are not.
IS RELIGION JUST STRANGENESS?
At first sight, it should not be difficult to understand which features
are common in religion and which are not. All we would have to do,
or so it seems, is collect lots of examples from around the world and
tabulate which features come up more frequently than others. In
George Eliot's Middlemarch, the dour religious scholar Casaubon is
engaged in precisely this kind of exercise. His goal is to find the "key
to all mythologies" by collecting thousands of myths from thousands
of places. In real life, the Victorian scholar James Frazer did exactly
that and published twelve volumes of The Golden Bough, an inter-
minable journey through world religion and myth.
This is not the way I proceed here. First, even if I and other
anthropologists really did research this way, and even if this worked,
there would be no reason to inflict such penitential fact-gathering
journeys on our readers. But more importantly, this mindless collect-
ing just does not work. It comes as no surprise that Casaubon's searchRELIGION EXPLAINED