Search Results for big-gods

Psychology

Big Gods

Gods as “full access strategic agents”: Boyer, 2001; for experimental evidence: Purzycki et al., 2012. 25. Kwaio beliefs about adalo ancestor spirits: Keesing, 1982. 26. Interventionist ancestor gods nevertheless are unlike Big Gods in ...

Author: Ara Norenzayan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

ISBN: 9780691169743

Category: Psychology

Page: 264

View: 472

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Examines how the belief in gods has lead to cooperation and sometimes conflict between groups. The author also looks at how some cooperative societies have developed without belief in gods.
2015-08-25 By Ara Norenzayan
English poetry

Dear Big Gods

Mona Arshi. Dear Big Gods Dear Big Gods Mona Arshi. Cover.

Author: Mona Arshi

Publisher: Pavilion Poetry

ISBN: 9781786942159

Category: English poetry

Page: 64

View: 990

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Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues in its lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief. These extraordinary poems, which see Arshi continuing with her experiments with form, relocate experiences in both past and future feeling, in both the intimacies of ordinariness and the collective experience of myth. Moving and discomfiting, these poems tune, in their acute emotional awareness of individual pain, to the dangers and unsettling violences of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, at the centre of this book is an overarching commitment to hope, in whatever form it takes, to the earth's tiny creatures, and its 'churning, broken song'.
2019-04-30 By Mona Arshi
Biography & Autobiography

Little Wilson and Big God

But she was a Welsh girl who, though of large stupidity, was of melting prettiness, abundant fair hair, and long legs in gunmetal artificial silk. ... This was an ecstatic experience, as it had to be if it deserved God's brimstone.

Author: Anthony Burgess

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: 9781446452554

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 480

View: 691

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These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.
2012-11-30 By Anthony Burgess
Philosophy

God Naturalized

the emergence of complex large-scale societies during the Holocene and the second is the emergence of prosocial religion with its notion of big, powerful, moralizing, and punishing gods, henceforth, “Big Gods” (Norenzayan et al.

Author: Halvor Kvandal

Publisher: Springer Nature

ISBN: 9783030831783

Category: Philosophy

Page: 204

View: 968

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This volume argues that theistic philosophy should be seen not as an “armchair” enterprise but rather as a critical endeavor to bring philosophy of religion into close contact with emerging sciences of religion. This text engages with the rationality of religious belief by investigating central problems and arguments in philosophy of religion from the perspective of new naturalistic research. A central question the book analyzes is whether findings in cognitive science of religion (CSR) falsify or undermine religious ideas and beliefs. With regard to CSR, this volume offers a sustained and critical investigation of the neutrality and positive-relevance view, before offering a re-appraisal of the conflict view. The text argues that when scrutinizing these views, much more attention must be paid to specific normative premises that allow empirical findings to have epistemic relevance. A novel feature is the theoretical application of analytical epistemology in virtue-epistemology to the central question of whether CSR undermines, supports, or is neutral with respect to religious belief. This book appeals to upper-level students and researchers in the field.
2021-10-27 By Halvor Kvandal
Religion

Big Bang Big God

“Big Bang, Big God is an engaging introductory account of the history of Big Bang Cosmology, including a detailed discussion of the underlying physics and a Christian perspective on its theological and philosophical implications.

Author: Rodney Holder

Publisher: Lion Books

ISBN: 9780745957869

Category: Religion

Page: 208

View: 708

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How did the universe begin and how has it evolved? Does a scientific explanation mean that we can do without God? Why are the laws of nature so special ('fine-tuned') as to produce a universe with intelligent creatures like us in it in the first place? Can the existence of a multiverse, a vast or infinite collection of universes, explain the specialness of this universe? This book argues that only God provides an explanation for the universe to exist at all, and that design by God provides the best and most rational explanation to adopt for the fine-tuning.
2013-10-18 By Rodney Holder
Psychology

Questions in the Psychology of Religion

Big Gods. Big Gods are omnipresent and omniscient. Big Gods monitor the behavior of the individuals in the group to keep track of who is behaving properly and who is not. Big Gods, according to Norenzayan have become much more prevalent ...

Author: Kevin S. Seybold

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

ISBN: 9781498238823

Category: Psychology

Page: 240

View: 584

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What does it means to be human? What is the origin of religious beliefs? Why are we moral creatures? Are religious experiences different from our everyday experiences? Is my brain involved in my experiencing God? What is a soul and do I have one? Is religion a result of evolutionary processes? How might psychology and religion relate? Religious experiences (behaviors, thoughts, and emotions) are determined, at least in part, by natural physical processes. As a result, the empirical methods used in psychology to try to identify the natural mechanisms that influence why we act, think, and feel the way we do can provide important insights into the fundamental and universal phenomena of religion. Drawing on current research from a variety of disciplines, Questions in the Psychology of Religion is appropriate for college students studying psychology, pastors as they help their congregations understand how religion and science might go together, and anyone who learns about recent discoveries in psychological science and wonders how these findings pertain to religion and religious experiences.
2017-03-16 By Kevin S. Seybold
Social Science

Religious Evolution and the Axial Age

that a Big God is watching them, they are more apt to follow social norms and to be cooperative than when there is no such god. Norenzayan's Big Gods seem to be similar to Swanson's fourth type of high gods, a god that is active in ...

Author: Stephen K. Sanderson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9781350047440

Category: Social Science

Page: 320

View: 740

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Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.
2018-01-25 By Stephen K. Sanderson
Philosophy

Metaphysics and Cognitive Science

transgressions such as theft and exploitation, which preoccupy the Big Gods of major world religions. . . . Religion's early roots did not have a wide moral scope. (2013, 7) Norenzayan writes as if he were telling us what preoccupied ...

Author: Alvin I. Goldman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780190639686

Category: Philosophy

Page: 352

View: 512

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This volume illustrates how the methodology of metaphysics can be enriched with the help of cognitive science. Few philosophers nowadays would dispute the relevance of cognitive science to the metaphysics of mind, but this volume mainly concerns the relevance of metaphysics to phenomena that are not themselves mental. The volume is thus a departure from standard analytical metaphysics. Among the issues to which results from cognitive science are brought to bear are the metaphysics of time, of morality, of meaning, of modality, of objects, and of natural kinds, as well as whether God exists. A number of chapters address the enterprise of metaphysics in general. In traditional analytical metaphysics, intuitions play a prominent role in the construction of, and assessment of theories. Cognitive science can be brought to bear on the issue of the reliability of intuitions. Some chapters point out how results from cognitive science can be deployed to debunk certain intuitions, and some point out how results can be deployed to help vindicate certain intuitions. Many metaphysicians have taken to heart the moral that physics should be taken into account in addressing certain metaphysical issues. The overarching point of the volume is that in many instances beyond the nature of the mind itself, cognitive science should also be consulted.
2019-03-27 By Alvin I. Goldman
Education

Perspectives

The term 'little gods' refers to the multiple, often local, and ineffectual gods that many hunter-gatherer traditions adhered to. These gods stand in contrast to 'big gods' that accompanied the agricultural revolution, the development ...

Author: William F Brown

Publisher: FriesenPress

ISBN: 9781460270301

Category: Education

Page: 412

View: 667

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From the first seconds Following the Big Bang, to our best guesses for the fate of the universe and humanity, science provides stunning new perspectives about the place of humanity in the cosmos. Humans may live on one planet in one small corner of the Milky Way, itself one of billions of other galaxies, but Earth may be unique in one respect. Earth is teaming with life, one species of which, through chance and natural selection, developed an extraordinary brain, gifted with imagination, curiosity and a compulsion to understand ourselves and the universe. Perspectives is a journey through deep time, from the creation of the universe to the beginnings of life, our human origins and later the rise of culture and religion. It explores what it means to be human, and where our technology could take us in the years and centuries to come....
2016-03-04 By William F Brown
Social Science

Religion Crime and Punishment

Norenzayan's overarching argument claims that the development of so-called Big Gods (a place marker for a diverse range of supernatural entities and processes characteristic of world religions) has facilitated the expansion of prosocial ...

Author: Russil Durrant

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9783319644288

Category: Social Science

Page: 224

View: 512

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This book provides a critical discussion of the way in which religion influences: criminal and antisocial behaviour, punishment and the law, intergroup conflict and peace-making, and the rehabilitation of offenders. The authors argue that in order to understand how religion is related to each of these domains it is essential to recognise the evolutionary origins of religion as well as how genetic and cultural evolutionary processes have shaped its essential characteristics. Durrant and Poppelwell posit that the capacity of religion to bind individuals into socially cohesive ‘moral communities’ can help us to understand its complex relationship with cooperation, crime, punishment, inter-group conflict and forgiveness. An original and innovative study, this book will be of special interest to criminologists and other social scientists interested in the role of religion in crime, punishment, intergroup conflict and law.
2017-10-17 By Russil Durrant

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