Religion Explained
by Pascal Boyer · first published 2001
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4HN commenters
2010–2020first – last mentioned
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Formerly at Princeton, King's College, Cambridge and the University of Lyon, Pascal Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St Louis, MissouriWhile human religious practice and belief are extraordinarily varied, they are nevertheless not infinitely so. The varieties of belief have provided generations of anthropologists and religious scholars with material for research; there have been fewer attempts to explore what religious beliefs have in common - and fewer still that have been convincing. Following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker's explorations of
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Last week I just finished 'Religion Explained' by Pascal Boyer - and it is indeed quite good explanation - I recommend that book. In short the theory presented there is about religion as a kind of side effect of having brains trained for what was…
on “Neurotheology: This Is Your Brain On Religion ” ↗…None of these things are bad, they are quite useful to the majority when someone tells them that tulip mania (for example) is irrational. A book that I keep thinking about years after I read it, is Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained). While the topic is religion, its more an examination of beliefs, superstition and cultural norms through the lens of anthropology,…
on “The Social Media Problem” ↗…devil's advocate. If somebody wanted to produce a real AI, every bit as intelligent as a human, he probably wouldn't go wrong by trying to reproduce in software what Pascal Boyer describes in his book "Religion Explained". http://www.Amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origin... Boyer fails, in my mind, in many ways, but at the very least by not providing a solution to the Frame Problem. The Frame Problem looms…
on “MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award” ↗…can't understand why some works of art resonate with us. The computational folkloristics field has found some very interesting patterns (see for instance http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu). In "Religion Explained" Pascal Boyer describes why certain myths resonate with us and others do not.
on “Heretical Things Statistics Tell Us About Fiction” ↗