This was thoughtful and interesting, and summarizes ideas I've not really encountered before in a very approachable way. Thank you!
I had many thoughts but just want to share a quick one on Point 11: Modes of religiosity theory. You differentiate between doctrinal, repetitive, low-sensory rituals and and imagistic, intense, high-sensory rituals, and say that "the rituals of modern Christianity would fall in (the former) category." I immediately thought of the many charismatic Christian sects that feature mass baptisms, snake handling, faith healing, or even just a rousing Gospel choir. It seems to me that a more telling distinction would be between rituals that you can observe as an audience and those that demand your participation. I was raised Catholic, and as long as you kneel and stand at the proper times, little is asked of you. Big difference between that and a service in which the audience become the performance, which I'd imagine can be a powerful bonding experience. And at least in the United States, the latter scales up very well.
This depends a lot on cultural factors. OCD tends to be opportunistic and latches onto areas of personal relevance. In Western, secular countries, up to as many as a third of people with OCD have some scrupulous symptoms and about 5% have primary scrupulosity. In some religious cultures and subcultures, religious symptoms are present for the majority of people with OCD (Eisen et al., 1999; Mataix-Cols et al., 2002; Foa and Kozak, 1995; Tolin et al. 2001; Greenberg and Huppert, 2010).
This is outstanding. Thank you. It crystallizes so much of what’s been on the tip of my brain for years, much of it related to religion, but also more generally to cognition. Love the approach.
Failure to clearly distinguish between human spirituality and religion has led to some flawed assumptions that mar an otherwise good examination of CSR. A definition of religion at the beginning would have greatly helped. Religion is institutionalized spirituality. From this definition, the flawed assumption is that: “Now, if all of these different cultures are arriving at religion independently, then the most obvious conclusion to draw is that there must be certain features of the human mind that are consistently giving rise to religious belief and behaviour.” While it is true that all known human cultures have spirituality as a central feature of their social mind, not every human culture has institutionalized that spirituality as religion.
While institutionalized spirituality, aka religion, may have become the dominant aspect of most human cultures, there have always been cultures whose spirituality was never institutionalized. More important, even in cultures where religion has become a dominant cognitive feature, there has always been a counter-culture whose spirituality rejects institutionalization. This also leads to the flawed assumption that all human spirituality involves the belief in god or gods. There are many cultures whose spirituality revolves around spirits rather than gods. The key difference here is that spirits exist on the same plane as humans as opposed to gods who occupy a different realm of existence. Atheism may indeed be the opposite of religion but it is not the opposite pole of human spirituality. Human non-spirituality until recently has been very rare as a social phenomenon, and could be roughly characterized as “evil.” Today non-spirituality has become much more widespread, perhaps even culturally dominant, in the form of not just atheism, but materialism and nihilism.
This was thoughtful and interesting, and summarizes ideas I've not really encountered before in a very approachable way. Thank you!
I had many thoughts but just want to share a quick one on Point 11: Modes of religiosity theory. You differentiate between doctrinal, repetitive, low-sensory rituals and and imagistic, intense, high-sensory rituals, and say that "the rituals of modern Christianity would fall in (the former) category." I immediately thought of the many charismatic Christian sects that feature mass baptisms, snake handling, faith healing, or even just a rousing Gospel choir. It seems to me that a more telling distinction would be between rituals that you can observe as an audience and those that demand your participation. I was raised Catholic, and as long as you kneel and stand at the proper times, little is asked of you. Big difference between that and a service in which the audience become the performance, which I'd imagine can be a powerful bonding experience. And at least in the United States, the latter scales up very well.
Thanks again.
Within OCD studies, this is called "scrupulosity"
This depends a lot on cultural factors. OCD tends to be opportunistic and latches onto areas of personal relevance. In Western, secular countries, up to as many as a third of people with OCD have some scrupulous symptoms and about 5% have primary scrupulosity. In some religious cultures and subcultures, religious symptoms are present for the majority of people with OCD (Eisen et al., 1999; Mataix-Cols et al., 2002; Foa and Kozak, 1995; Tolin et al. 2001; Greenberg and Huppert, 2010).
https://iocdf.org/faith-ocd/what-is-ocd-scrupulosity/#:~:text=The%20behavior%20and%20mental%20life,might%20feel%20peaceful%20or%20calm.
Great article! And by complete coincidence, today I finished this book about the roots of religion in shamanism:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/456535/shamanism-by-singh-manvir/9780241638415
This is outstanding. Thank you. It crystallizes so much of what’s been on the tip of my brain for years, much of it related to religion, but also more generally to cognition. Love the approach.
Failure to clearly distinguish between human spirituality and religion has led to some flawed assumptions that mar an otherwise good examination of CSR. A definition of religion at the beginning would have greatly helped. Religion is institutionalized spirituality. From this definition, the flawed assumption is that: “Now, if all of these different cultures are arriving at religion independently, then the most obvious conclusion to draw is that there must be certain features of the human mind that are consistently giving rise to religious belief and behaviour.” While it is true that all known human cultures have spirituality as a central feature of their social mind, not every human culture has institutionalized that spirituality as religion.
While institutionalized spirituality, aka religion, may have become the dominant aspect of most human cultures, there have always been cultures whose spirituality was never institutionalized. More important, even in cultures where religion has become a dominant cognitive feature, there has always been a counter-culture whose spirituality rejects institutionalization. This also leads to the flawed assumption that all human spirituality involves the belief in god or gods. There are many cultures whose spirituality revolves around spirits rather than gods. The key difference here is that spirits exist on the same plane as humans as opposed to gods who occupy a different realm of existence. Atheism may indeed be the opposite of religion but it is not the opposite pole of human spirituality. Human non-spirituality until recently has been very rare as a social phenomenon, and could be roughly characterized as “evil.” Today non-spirituality has become much more widespread, perhaps even culturally dominant, in the form of not just atheism, but materialism and nihilism.