Developmental theories suggest that children initially conceptualize God in concrete, anthropomorphic terms. In contrast, recent research has found that from early on, children recognize God as a being radically different from humans. Previous research has been limited to studies of Christian children. The present study questioned children and adults raised in a religious tradition (Church of J...

By the early twentieth century, Britain and all of its Atlantic colonies prohibited the “pretended” use of supernatural powers or rituals such as fortunetelling, obeah, sorcery, and witchcraft. Legislators and others policymakers throughout the Anglophone Atlantic justified these proscriptions using similar narratives; they described occult practitioners as charlatans and vagabonds. Metropolita...

One of the central claims of Norenzayan et al.'s article is that supernatural monitoring and intergroup competition have facilitated the rise of large-scale prosocial religions. Although the authors outline in detail how social instincts that govern supernatural monitoring are honed by cultural evolution and have given rise to Big Gods, they do not provide a clear explanation for the success of...

The portrayal of psychiatry and of the activities of supernatural forces in indigenous films produced in West Africa was critically examined in this study. Most often the content of these films is centred on African culture, African mythical stories, or real life events. Over a three year period, 163 such films were studied. Twenty five (15.3%) of them contained scenes of psychiatric illness. I...