Of gods and men

Reviewed Work: The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey by Jenny Strauss Clay

Perceiving Minds and Gods: How Mind Perception Enables, Constrains, and Is Triggered by Belief in Gods.

Most people believe in the existence of empirically unverifiable gods. Despite apparent heterogeneity, people's conceptions of their gods center on predictable themes. Gods are overwhelmingly represented as intentional agents with (more or less) humanlike mental lives. This article reviews converging evidence suggesting that this regularity in god concepts exists in part because the ability to ...

You Shall Be as Gods

the religious testaments and presentday statements on human personality. The schism is only partly due to the need for specialisation of knowledge, and even as late as the twelfth century Moses Maimonides, living in Spain and writing in Arabic, was physician, philosopher, mathematician, and biblical commentator. The ghettos in Central Europe, in contrast, were created in a culture which separat...

Gods, Rituals, and the Moral Order

The functionalist “law” that religion sustains the moral order must be amended. As is demonstrated in this study, religion has this effect only as it is based on belief in powerful, active, conscious, morally-concerned gods. Contrary to Durkheim’s claims, participation in religious rituals per se has little independent impact on morality and none when done on behalf of gods conceived as unconsc...

Belief in moralizing gods

According to Alexander’s [Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter] theory of morality, human social groups became large as a result of between-group competition over preferred habitats and resources, but although larger social groups are more successful in competition, they also experience more pressures to fission. Morality unites a society by limitin...