238 mind
and norms as a culturally variable phenomenon. Here are a few facts we all
know but should keep at the forefront of our attention when we discuss reli-
gion:
- Most religious systems in the world are not about an eternal Creator.
- In fact, the creation of the universe is of limited interest to most peo-
ple in the world. - People can have many gods, or a few gods, or a combination of sev-
eral gods and many spirits, or a few spirits and many gods, or many
ancestors and no spirits, and so on. - Gods are said to die in many traditions.
- They are remarkably stupid in many others.
- The “salvation of the soul” is alien to most people’s ideas about
death.
The point of this is to emphasize how parochial, as it were, many accounts
of religion can be. Religion probably does not stem from a desire to explain
the origin of the universe, since most people get by perfectly well without any
creation account; there is no instinct for transcendence in human beings, since
the most frequent religious beings are ancestors who are assumed to be as real
as the living, only more elusive; you cannot explain religion as moral coercion
combined with promised rewards, since in many places the soul needs no
salvation and will in due time become an ancestor.
Paying attention to the true diversity of religious concepts and norms is
certainly necessary, but it is far from sufficient. We can compile lists of different
religious concepts and measure the relative frequency of particular notions.
This is what anthropologists have done and this is a necessary starting point.
But is it enough? To take a distant example, philologists have for a long time
documented the variety of languages, the relative distance between them, their
plausible historical connections, as well as established a catalog of extant gram-
matical systems. But at some point linguists decided toexplainlinguistic struc-
ture, which in effect meant this: underneath the luxuriant variety of systems,
there are a few underlying rules. These rules do not come from nowhere: they
are the consequence of how human brains function.
A similar scenario is conceivable for the diversity and underlying common
features of religious ideas. As in the case of language, it implies that we should
consider, beyond the actual concepts and norms that we call religion, the men-
tal systems that support them. This I think is now possible, in a way that is
quite different from what it would have been thirty years ago, because of our
constantly increasing knowledge of the mind-brain.
In the following pages I use various kinds of evidence to suggest how
different mental systems are involved in the selection of religious concepts.
The human mind is not a single system designed to produce an accurate rep-
resentation of the world. Rather, it consists of multiple systems geared to rep-