New Approach to Explain Religious Behavior

[Overdog]

I came across this article today and thought it was very interesting, especially since it seemed to lend some support to the idea that religion (and religious behavior) is something that is inherent in our nature as human beings.

Without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to study religion by focusing on verbal communication, an identifiable behavior, instead of speculating about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified.

"Instead of studying religion by trying to measure unidentifiable beliefs in the supernatural, we looked at identifiable and observable behavior - the behavior of people communicating acceptance of supernatural claims," said Craig T. Palmer, associate professor of anthropology in the MU College of Arts and Science. "We noticed that communicating acceptance of a supernatural claim tends to promote cooperative social relationships. This communication demonstrates a willingness to accept, without skepticism, the influence of the speaker in a way similar to a child's acceptance of the influence of a parent."

Palmer and Lyle B. Steadman, emeritus professor of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University, explored the supernatural claims in different forms of religion, including ancestor worship; totemism, the claim of kinship between people and a species or other object that serves as the emblem of a common ancestor; and shamanism, the claim that traditional religious leaders in kinship-based societies could communicate with their dead ancestors. They found that the clearest identifiable effect of religious behavior is the promotion of cooperative family-like social relationships, which include parent/child-like relationships between the individuals making and accepting the supernatural claims and sibling-like relationships among co-acceptors of those claims.

"Almost every religion in the world, including all tribal religions, use family kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister and child for fellow members," Steadman said. "They do this to encourage the kind of behavior found normally in families - where the most intense social relationships occur. Once people realize that observing the behavior of people communicating acceptance of supernatural claims is how we actually identify religious behavior and religion, we can then propose explanations and hypotheses to account for why people have engaged in religious behavior in all known cultures."

Palmer and Steadman published their research in The Supernatural and Natural Selection: The Evolution of Religion. The book was published by Paradigm Publishers.

MU Anthropologist Develops New Approach to Explain Religious Behavior | MU News Bureau

[HydrogenBond]

If you look at supernatural, in practical terms, it implies something that is higher than human and therefore placed on a pedestal. The child often does the same thing with respect to the older siblings or the parents. The net affect is the individual keeps the inner child alive. As a child of god, or whatever, you can relate to others with the openness that children possess. Children also have a higher natural learning potential. They have more imagination. They are less petty about small superficial differences including race and color. They are less perverse. Less snobby and less able to lie and con. They are closer to natural instincts. It appears to be a win-win situation.

[ChunTzu]

Just a couple of quotes that came to mind...

A child's mind is nothing at all; it is zero mind. It's like a clear mirror. Red comes, red; white comes, white. Only reflected action: when a child is hungry, it eats; when it is tired, it only sleeps.

-Zen Master Seung Sahn

Religion- whether we choose to name the experience thus or not- is to be lured by the transitory that reveals the transcendent, to be captured by the aesthetic that that discloses the divine word, and it is to mingle those categories so that, ultimately, an integrative play cancels discrimination and makes obsolete or meaningless divisions between sacred and profane...The world is no longer divided then, into those inconvenient categories of subject and object, and the world becomes religiously apprehended...Religion, like the meaning of life or a good joke, defies definition or explanation. But like these two, heightening awareness enriches the experiences...

- Lynda Sexson from Ordinarily Sacred