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...

We have already stated summarily what the punishment should be for temple-robbing, whether by open force or secretly. But the punishments for the various sorts of insolence in speech or action with regard to the gods, which a man can show in word or deed, have to be proclaimed after we have provided an exordium. Let this be it: "No one believing, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the g...

in the 90s, a remarkable number of manuscripts were found in northern afghanistan, including economic documents, legal documents, and letters, which have become an important resource for academic studies. this paper aims to investigate the bactrian pantheon as reflected in the economic documents of this collection. at first, these economic documents and the pantheon mentioned in them are introd...

As appeals to what gods know and care about often motivate and rationalize human behavior, understanding shared models of gods’ minds is crucial for understanding religion’s contributions to human sociality. If religious systems function to minimize the effects of social and ecological problems, then models of gods’ concerns should coevolve with these problems. The present work assesses this pr...

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...

Recent studies of the evolution of religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in supernatural agents, the role of ritual in promoting cooperation, and the contribution of morally punishing high gods to the growth and stabilization of human society. The universality of religion across human society points to a deep evolutionary past. However, specific traits of nascent religios...

An infinity of gods collectively select a random natural number by each removing a finite number of balls from an urn in a reverse supertask. It is discussed whether this is an absurdity that indicates the impossibility of reverse supertasks.

One central feature of the God of Israel, highlighted in the holy Scriptures of the Jews, was that he had h)nq. The word means zeal, jealousy, and envy. In other words, Yahweh is a jealous God, envious of and zealous for all that belongs to him. He will give his glory to no other, “nor my praise to graven images”. 2 This God had now chosen Israel to be his people. The people, then, were to show...