BETH MOORE DANIEL BIBLE STUDY SESSION PORTABLE

This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife.” And because we look for intentionality in human beings and human systems, we slide easily into “inferring goals and desires where none exist. Only yesterday, Ross Douthat offered a thoughtful column in the New York Times on the core question of “ Where Does Religion Come From?” Among other opinions, he summarized the views of Paul Bloom:īecause “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds,” it’s easy for us “to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. The near-ubiquitous quality of revered supernatural mother figures presumably originates in this context. Observers have long suggested that this fact contributes mightily to our willingness to hypothesize the existence of gods, angels, or supernatural sources of wisdom and guidance. Compared to other mammalian species, we spend a large proportion of our lives in a state of utter physical and psychological dependency on a larger and all-powerful figure or figures. Moreover, humans are children for a very long portion of their existence.

We know that our identity must continue somewhere, in some form, giving rise to widespread ideas of an afterlife. Intellectually, we know that we will die, but it is literally impossible for us to imagine our own non-existence. This core identity that we possess must have come from somewhere, some other realm, and it must continue somewhere in some form. That does not mean that all societies have a belief in personal immortality, since they do not but the notion of a soul or souls separate from the vehicle of flesh and blood is very common. This self-consciousness encourages a belief in an absolute reality of self external to the body. Most basic to human consciousness is the sense of individual self: we exist, we are. Some “religious” ideas have what we might call a common-sense quality. Abundant evidence now shows how readily and naturally people in virtually all societies, and all eras, naturally “go religious” as circumstances demand, and likewise resort to ritual behavior. This extensive literature addressed such issues as the obvious human need not just to imagine and portray supernatural beings but to locate their activities, and to believe in the crossing of seemingly impermeable boundaries, notably that dividing life and death. From the early 1990s, a number of scholars created what has become a thriving discipline of the Cognitive Science of Religion, commonly abbreviated to CSR (the phrase dates to 2000). That question found new foundations with the emergence of sociobiology and the latest variants of evolutionary theory. Having said that, many aspects of human behavior and shared experience heavily predispose us to ritualistic responses, of the kind that so often characterize lived religion.

Noting such powerful impulses, scholars have long theorized about biological and evolutionary bases of religious belief, even proposing concepts such as a “God Gene.” Might the religious drive itself might be natural and inborn, as much an instinct as any other? Such grand claims have attracted much criticism, usually because they are reductionist and mechanistic, and they remain controversial.

Those elements appear naturally, whether or not they are absorbed in some larger agglomeration of beliefs, and still less of formal credal statements.

BETH MOORE DANIEL BIBLE STUDY SESSION PORTABLE

Those commonalities would include ideas about sacred space and charismatic individuals about the proper ways of showing respect to holy things about ideas of pilgrimage about the quest for spiritual healing about using portable objects to enhance benefits and protect against evils about the power of fasting and regulating foods and about various forms of divination. In many parts of the world, and in diverse historical eras, some motifs are so widespread that they seem to arise naturally and intuitively, and prolifically. Religious traditions and creeds differ very widely, but types of religious behavior and belief are very common indeed. Witness the number of books from major publishers with copyright dates of 2022-2024. I have posted online a bibliography of recent publications on this area, and do note how very current this literature is.

Beth moore daniel bible study session