Summary of Robert Wright's The Evolution of God

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The idea of comparing the religions of primitive peoples to the religion of civilized people is offensive to many Europeans. They believe that their religion is superior, and that it is impossible to understand the motives behind the actions of primitive peoples.
#2 The Bible, the oldest scripture in the Abrahamic tradition, contains traces of its ancestry. Monotheistic prayer didn’t grow out of Chukchee rituals or beliefs, but the logic of monotheistic prayer may have grown out of a kind of belief the Chukchee held, that forces of nature are animated by minds or spirits that you can influence through negotiation.
#3 The theory of animism, which was the dominant explanation of how religion began, was based on the idea that humans attribute life to the inanimate. It was promoted by Edward Tylor, a hugely influential thinker who believed that the primordial form of religion was animism.
#4 The animist view of the world is that it is inhabited by spirits that can be found everywhere. These spirits are what make up all of the things in the world, and they all have a soul. The animist view of the world began to evolve, and eventually became polytheism.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• History
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian Theology

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 17 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822514072
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Robert Wright's The Evolution of God
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The idea of comparing the religions of primitive peoples to the religion of civilized people is offensive to many Europeans. They believe that their religion is superior, and that it is impossible to understand the motives behind the actions of primitive peoples.

#2

The Bible, the oldest scripture in the Abrahamic tradition, contains traces of its ancestry. Monotheistic prayer didn’t grow out of Chukchee rituals or beliefs, but the logic of monotheistic prayer may have grown out of a kind of belief the Chukchee held, that forces of nature are animated by minds or spirits that you can influence through negotiation.

#3

The theory of animism, which was the dominant explanation of how religion began, was based on the idea that humans attribute life to the inanimate. It was promoted by Edward Tylor, a hugely influential thinker who believed that the primordial form of religion was animism.

#4

The animist view of the world is that it is inhabited by spirits that can be found everywhere. These spirits are what make up all of the things in the world, and they all have a soul. The animist view of the world began to evolve, and eventually became polytheism.

#5

The modern understanding of how religion first emerged from the human mind is that it was developed by people who were trying to make sense of the world. As understanding of the world grew through science, religion evolved in reaction.

#6

The best evidence of prehistoric religion is the beliefs of hunter-gatherer societies. These are widespread and strange, and it is unlikely that they were imported.

#7

The Klamath, a hunter-gatherer people in what is now Oregon, talked. And, fortunately for us, they talked to someone who understood them more clearly than visitors often do: Albert Samuel Gatschet, a pioneering linguist who in the 1870s compiled a dictionary and grammar of the Klamath language.

#8

Hunter-gatherer societies typically feature spirits of the deceased, and these spirits do at least as much good as bad. They explain the otherwise mysterious workings of nature, and they are seamlessly interwoven into their everyday thought and action.

#9

The question of why bad things happen is a particular interest of hunter-gatherers. The answer is that the supernatural realm is populated by various beings that, as a rule, are strikingly like human beings. They’re not always in a good mood, and the things that put them in a bad mood don’t have to make much sense.

#10

Hunter-gatherer gods are not paragons of virtue, and they are often treated as such. They are kind on some days, less kind on others. The Ainu, Japan’s aborigines, would sometimes try to win divine favor with offerings of millet beer, but if the gods didn’t reciprocate with good fortune, the Ainu would threaten to withhold future beer unless things improved.

#11

The religions of savage societies are generally well-defined and praiseworthy, but they lack a clear moral dimension. The rules of these religions are not about behaviors that actually harm other people, but about breaches of ritual.

#12

Religion is mostly about morality today, but it did not start out that way. Hunter-gatherer societies do not use the ultimate moral incentive, a heaven for the good and a hell for the bad. They instead have an afterlife, but it is almost never a carrot or a stick.

#13

The moral compass of modern societies is not based on love and generosity, but on fear of punishment by a larger society. This is not the case in hunter-gatherer societies, where these values are not preached or reinforced by threat of religious reprisal.

#14

Religion, in all its forms, tries to explain why bad things happen and offer a way to make things better. The modern assumption is that the unseen order, the divine, is inherently good, and discrepancies between divine designs and our own aims reflect shortcomings on our part.

#15

Religion has always been about self-interest, and it has in one sense or another always been about moral and spiritual truth as well. But over time, religion has gotten closer to moral and spiritual truth, and for that matter, more compatible with scientific truth.

#16

The stock market is a powerful and mysterious force that shapes the lives of millions of people. It is called the stock market, and there are people who claim to have special insights into it. However, most of them have been wrong about the market’s future behavior.

#17

The first step toward an archbishop or an ayatollah is the shaman, who connects the earliest religion - a mixture of beliefs about a variety of spirits - with what religion became: a distinct body of belief and practice kept in shape by an authoritative institution.

#18

The history of shamanism includes many positive aspects, but it also includes some of the flaws that have dogged religion ever since. Religion, having come from the brains of people, is bound to bear the marks of our species for better and worse.

#19

The emergence of religious leadership was a natural thing. Primordial religion consisted of people telling stories to explain why good and bad things happen, and to predict their happening. Whenever people compete in the realm of explanation, prediction, and intervention, some of them become leaders.

#20

In some societies, a high batting average is inherently likely. Among the Aranda of central Australia, one of the shaman’s jobs is to ensure that solar eclipses are temporary, which allows the average shamanic medical intervention to be vindicated.

#21

The shaman’s remuneration, like that of modern doctors, came on a per-service basis. In some societies, the shaman’s power was guaranteed, and he could be saved from this unseemly haggling by a spirit that set the fee.

#22

shamans in pre-agricultural societies profit from their reputation for special access to the supernatural. They use deception to help the spirits speak, and they cure illness by sucking a malignant object out of the patient and displaying it for all to see.

#23

The shaman’s life has enough downside to discourage a pure charlatan out to make an easy buck. In addition to the deprivation and trauma, sexual abstinence is often required.

#24

There are many examples of shamans who have been completely sincere, and others who have been calculating frauds. The distinction between these two groups may be unclear in the mind of the religious leader in question.

#25

The idea that the brain is susceptible to being manipulated to create spiritual experiences is not new. shamans have long claimed that their techniques are effective, and many have had valid spiritual experiences. But modern biological science can’t validate the validity of these experiences.

#26

The fact that we are able to experience pure contemplative awareness does not mean that our everyday sense of wary separation from all but a few kin and trusted friends is morally or metaphysically true.

#27

The role of the shaman in cultivating antagonism and violence between societies is evidence against the romantic view of religion as pure. The tendency is evident even within societies, in local competition for supernatural supremacy.

#28

There are two main schools of thought on the role of religion in the age of the shaman: the functionalists, who believe that religion serves the interests of society as a whole, and the cynics, who believe that religion is a tool of social control.

#29

Marx’s view of hunter-gatherer life was too simple. While a small society that lives barely above the subsistence level is more egalitarian than a modern industrial society, it is difficult to claim there are no differentials of power in a society where shamans amass gifts by instilling irrational fear.

#30

The Polynesian islands were home to many different chiefdoms, and their religion was based on reverence for the divine. The indigenous societies of the Polynesian islands were what anthropologists call chiefdoms.

#31

The most advanced form of social organization in the world 7,000 years ago was the chiefdom, and their political and religious systems were deeply intertwined. Their rulers had a special connection to the divine, and used this status to political advantage.

#32

The Polynesian islands are a testament to the fact that cultural evolution is similar to biological evolution. Just as Darwin noticed subtly different physiology among finches that lived on different Galápagos islands, anthropologists have been struck by the cultural variation among the Polynesian islands.

#33

The religious dimension of the Polynesian economy was significant. The island of Tahiti, for example, had many gods and goddesses, and each fisherman chose his own god to pray to.

#34

Undergirding the islands’ economic life was two key religious principles: tapu and mana. Tapu referred to things set apart or forbidden. Mana was the divine power that flowed through the chiefs.

#35

The authority of the chief is a common feature of chiefdoms. After a Natchez chief’s death, his subjects would eat enough tobacco to lose consciousness and then be ritually strangled, thus accompanying the chief to the afterlife.

#36

In Polynesia, the chief used his divine authority for typical chiefly endeavors: organizing feasts, organizing armies, and maintaining roads and irrigation systems. However, in contrast to hunter-gatherer societies, there are limits on the scope of government coercion in chiefdoms, and this gave religion a second role in ordering society.

#37

Religion was a supplementary force of social control in chiefdoms. It was largely lacking in hunter-gatherer societies, but it began to