is futile and the magnum opus never sees the light of day. It is not ter-
ribly surprising either that The Golden Bough remained a sterile compi-
lation. Catalogues are not explanations.
To see why this matters, let me pursue our mock-experiment further.
What explains the difference between the first list and the other two?
One possible explanation is that religious concepts invariably include
some strangeproperties of imagined entities or agents. Religious ontolo-
gies, in this view, surprise people by describing things and events they
could not possibly encounter in actual experience. This is a very com-
mon view of religion. In a way, this account is nothing more than a dig-
nified version of the familiar notion that "man bites dog" is news but [55]
"dog bites man" is not. Religious concepts are an extremeform of that
phenomenon. We sometimes encounter people who bite dogs (well,
some of us must have seen that happen). But invisible persons who go
through walls, infinite persons who created everything...?
Take for instance some items on our first list:(1) Some people get old and then one day they stop breathing and die
and that's that.
(2) If you drop this special ritual object it will fall downward till it hits
the ground.
(4) Dead men do not talk (or walk).and compare them with a couple of propositions from our second
list:
(23) When people die, their souls sometimes come back in another
body.
(27) We pray to this statue because it listens to our prayers and helps us
get what we want.Obviously, the main problem with (1), (2) and (4) is that they
express something we all know. They are just too "banal" to start a
religion. Religious concepts are not usually so trite. In contrast, (23)
and (27) are surprising in the minimal sense that they describe
processes and agencies that are not part of everyday experience.
But this cannot be the solution. There are two obvious, incurable
problems with this "strangeness" theory. First, it says that religious
concepts are about objects and events we cannot actually experience.
WHATSUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARELIKE