X-Message-Number: 19420 Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 09:17:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Scott Badger <> Subject: Re: Significance of Beliefs about the Afterlife David Stodolsky cited the following: > 1 April - Aaron Blaisdell UCLA Psychology > Adaptive Significance of Beliefs about the Afterlife > > According to some evolutionary psychologists, human > social and cultural > behavior has been shaped by natural selection just > as have simple individual > behaviors. Thanks for this abstract, David. I'll have to ask for the complete article. I've long had an interest in this area. I call it "The God Instinct" and hope to write a book on the subject someday. Here's a section I like from another interesting article on this subject: The Biological Roots of Religion Is Faith in Our Genes? by Morton Hunt "Religion serves the same purposes as science and the arts - "the extraction of order from the mysteries of the material world," as [Edward O.] Wilson puts it [7] - but in the prescientific era there was no other source of order except for philosophy, which was comprehensible only to a favored few and in any case was nowhere nearly as emotionally satisfying as religion. Still another major function of religion was to act as a binding and cementing social force. I quote Wilson again: "Religion is ... empowered mightily by its principal ally, tribalism. The shamans and priests implore us in somber cadence, Trust in the sacred rituals, become part of the immortal force, you are one of us." [8] Religious propitiation and sacrifice - near-universals of religious practice - are acts of submission to a dominant being and dominance hierarchy." http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hunt_19_3.html Scott Badger "Vita Perpetua" __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19420