This study attempts to trace how religion could have originated in prehistory and antiquity, out of natural human and prehuman behaviour, without requiring the reality of the supernatural. Other views of what religion is being set aside, religion is here defined as <i>beliefs conceptions, practices and roles concerned with the putative supernatural. </i>A variety of manifestations or <i>elements</i> of religious belief and practice can be identified It is proposed that <i>they have separate origins. </i>Examples of <i>religious elements </i>are: life after death, ghosts, sacrifice, priests, shamans, gods, demons, .... It is argued that to try to reduce religion to one element is a mistake. There may be no single origin. But the individual elements have origins, and plausible theories can account for each. Using theories and insights of previous workers, elaborated as necessary with information from a range of sciences, arguments are presented to account for five major foundational religious elements, thereby illustrating and partly fulfilling what is potentially a much wider programme. The elements covered are: (1) Animatism: numina, daemons; (2) Animism: ghosts, souls; (3) Another world: life after death; (4) Another world: heaven; (5) Religious specialists: shamans. Chapter 1 introduces the programme. Chapter 2 sets out definitions, philosophical principles and methodology. Chapter 3 explores the specifically numinous quality which characterizes the supernatural in subjective experience. Chapter 4 describes brain structures and the neural substrate of experience. Chapter 5 proposes specific neuropsychological hypotheses to account for certain types of numinous or ‘supernatural’ experience. Chapter 6 deals with ape mentality, which may be presumed to characterize that of our remote ancestors, and identifies precursors of religious elements. Chapters 7 - 11 deal with the possibly separate origin of five major religious elements, as listed above.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:643196 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Clark, Richard |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/27803 |
Page generated in 0.0025 seconds