X-Message-Number: 22200
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:43:00 +0200
Subject: Re: Freedom of Religion
From: David Stodolsky <>

On Tuesday, July 15, 2003, at 11:00  AM, CryoNet wrote:

>
> Message #22194
> Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 09:33:13 -0400
> From: Keith Henson <>
> Subject: Cognitive science (was Freedom of Religion)
>
> David Stodolsky wrote:
>
> (Keith Henson)
>
>>> I strongly suggest that anyone who is interested in either defending
>>> against religion or making one up should get a copy of Pascal Boyer's
>>> _Religion Explained_ and read it through a few times, maybe delve  
>>> into
>>> some
>>> of the massive cites he provides.
>>
>> http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/boyer.html
>>
>> This review suggests that reading this book is likely to be a waste of
>> time.
>
> I don't see how you could get this from the review.  Here is some of  
> it.

"This book is a milestone on the road to a new behavioral   
understanding of religion, basing itself on what has come to be known  
as  cognitive anthropology, and pointedly ignoring much work done over  
the past one  hundred years in the behavioral study of religion and in  
the psychological  anthropology of religion. The author wishes to  
challenge accepted wisdom and  displays a contrarian spirit. No mention  
is made in this book of Freud, Durkheim, Wallace, La Barre, or  
Malinowski. We are in Year I of the Cognitive  Anthropology Revolution  
and the Old Regime has to be erased from memory. What  are the  
benefits, and costs, of this radical approach?"

Any one trying to explain this area, while ignoring the last hundred  
years of research is not following the scientific approach.

The rough nature of his attempt is obvious from these remarks in the  
review:


"Boyer describes religious ideas as  counter-intuitive , but  their  
universality shows that these concepts are actually natural and  
intuitive,  and, as Boyer himself points out, much more intuitive than  
the ideas of physics,  chemistry, or cognitive anthropology.

Despite the interesting and lucid attempt to formalize  animism and  
anthropomorphism by detailing general cognitive processes,  everything  
said here is compatible with earlier versions of animism and   
projection. The common belief is that  God knows that you are lying   
(p. 181).  The power to read minds attributed to gods and ancestors may  
be just that  attributed to parents by the young child, and later  
projected. Human experiences  must be expressed through a human  
vocabulary, and so, naturally and intuitively,  we ascribe humanity  
(i.e. conscious agency) to everything around us, until we  learn better.

One clear fact is that most denizens of the world of the  spirits are  
ghosts, the souls of human beings now dead. How do souls become   
ghosts? An interesting transformation takes place at death, as the  
deceased are  beginning to be perceived as malevolent and dangerous.  
This change demands an  explanation. Why do beloved dead become  
frightening ghosts? Boyer s explanation  is that the fear of ghosts  
stems from our fear of corpses, and there is an  evolutionary acquired  
fear of pathogens in the corpse. Thus, horror of the dead  is reduced  
to the fear of disease. This claim is made in the absence of evidence   
for any awareness of pathogens till fairly recent times (vide Ignaz   
Semmelweis). Humans seem unable to acquire useful ideas about hygiene  
in many  other cases, and these need to be explicitly taught. Besides,  
in many cultures  ways of handling corpses in mortuary rituals are far  
from hygienic.

The truth is that we are horrified by the corpses we see, but  we are  
just as terrified of ghosts we do not ever see, which are not tied to  
any  experience of corpses. Boyer is correct in pointing out the dead  
violate our  expectations of several ontological categories, and so are  
ideal candidates for  the supernatural world. Still, Chapter 6, titled  
Why is religion about death?,  turns out to be the least persuasive of  
the whole book, and the transformation  of the dear departed into  
malevolent ghosts remains a mystery. Freud s  recognition of our  
inevitable ambivalence about the departed has no place in  Boyer s  
armamentarium."


More important, however, is the failure to acknowledge the results from  
terror management theory, which, while extremely rigorous, have only  
been available for the last 15 years.



>
>> Boyer seem to be unaware of recent developments in anthropology and
>> psychology. A better source:
>>
>> ernestbecker.org
>
> Hmm.  They pitch:
>
> *************
>
> Death and Denial: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Legacy of  
> Ernest Becker
> by Daniel Liechty
>
> US List Price: USD $66.95
>
>  From Book News, Inc.
> Psychological anthropologist Becker's theory of Generative Death  
> Anxiety
>
GDA is the speculative aspect of the theoretical framework based upon  
Becker's work. The rigorous aspect is terror management theory. The  
Zygon article is probably the best summary (referenced on the site).



>
> Message #22197
> From: "mike99" <>
> Subject: RE: msg #22192 Re: Freedom of Religion
> Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 15:41:39 -0600
>
> ...
>>> [K. Henson] I strongly suggest that anyone who is interested in  
>>> either
> defending
>>> against religion or making one up should get a copy of Pascal Boyer's
>>> _Religion Explained_ and read it through a few times, maybe delve  
>>> into
>>> some
>>> of the massive cites he provides.
>
> David Stodolsky <> wrote:
>
>> http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/boyer.html
>>
>> This review suggests that reading this book is likely to be a waste of
>> time.
>>
>> Boyer seem to be unaware of recent developments in anthropology and
>> psychology. A better source:
>>
>> ernestbecker.org
>>
>> David S. Stodolsky    SpamTo: 
>
>
> I beg to differ, David. First, you mischaracterized that review of  
> Boyer's
> book at the human-nature.com website. Rather than the reviewer  
> claiming that
> reading Boyer's book is a waste of time, he concludes by stating  
> "Despite
> its limitations, this book is a first-rate attempt to move the study of
> religion in the direction desperately needed now more than ever."
>
> That hardly seems like a dismissal of Boyer's work.

My dismissal is based upon my knowledge of the field. I only used the  
review to get an idea of the book's coverage. If you have not read, for  
example, "In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror", which is  
backed by over a hundred rigorous studies and was at least 15 years in  
the making, then reading year one of cognitive anthropology, even if  
competently done, will be a waste of time, relatively speaking.

<http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/literature/bkreview/reviews/ 
d_liechty-911_brev14.htm>

<http://www.apa.org/books/431700E.html>


dss

David S. Stodolsky    SpamTo: 

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