FURTHER
READINGS
WHAT IS THE ORIGIN?
To get a better view of the diversity of religion as actually prac-
ticed by people around the world, the best place to start is John Bowen's Reli-
gions in Practice (1997). An excellent summary of how anthropologists, psy-
chologists and religious scholars approach religion, and why, is found in the
first two chapters of E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley's Rethinking
Religion(1990). That many concepts of religion have to do with ancient sur-
vival problems is the theme of Walter Burkert's Creation of the Sacred (1996),
which is based on extensive description of Greek and Middle Eastern ritual
and belief. Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999) presents the view of
culture as a large set of replicated "memes." Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture
(1996) presents the alternative notion of culture as epidemic similarity in
mental representations.
WHAT SUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARE LIKE
There is no dearth of books on the subject of magical and reli-
gious concepts... but few good catalogues of their variations and common
themes. Lehmann and Myers's Magic, Witchcraft and Religion (1993) is the
most readable and reasonable survey. Mark Turner's Literary Mind (1996),
although it is exclusively about supernatural notions, provides a very good
account of the structures of literary and mythical imagination. As concerns
the paranormal, Susan Blackmore's In Search of the Light (1996) is a very read-
able and funny account of a scientist trying to make sense of the evidence.
Nicholas Humphrey's Leaps of Faith (1996) presents a general explanation for
the popular fascination with paranormal phenomena.
THE KIND OF MIND IT TAKES
Among the many excellent books on the mind and the discoveries
of cognitive science, the most exciting is certainly Steven Pinker's How the
Mind Works (1997), with its highly detailed account of various inference sys-
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