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Formerly at Princeton, King's College, Cambridge and the University of Lyon, Pascal Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St Louis, MissouriWhile human religious practice and belief are extraordinarily varied, they are nevertheless not infinitely so. The varieties of belief have provided generations of anthropologists and religious scholars with material for research; there have been fewer attempts to explore what religious beliefs have in common - and fewer still that have been convincing. Following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker's explorations of what languages have in common beneath their vast superficial variety, Pascal Boyer explores the commonalities of religious belief, bringing the new tools of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to bear on the ways in which beliefs reflect human needs and the ways in which our minds work. This is no sense an attempt to explain religion away, or to reduce it to simplistic nostrums; Boyer is himself an anthropologist, and rejects almost all the usual obvious, but unsatisfying, explanations for religion, in a book that is certainly ambitious and provocative, but also a rich exploration of this profound and important area of human experience - an area that is almost as universal and central to our shared humanity as our common use of language.
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Religion Explained
2008, Random House Publishing Group
Electronic resource
in English
1407020889 9781407020884
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Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
2007, Basic Books
in English
046500461X 9780465004614
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Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
April 30, 2002, Basic Books
in English
0465006965 9780465006960
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Religion explained: the human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors
2001, William Heinnemann
in English
0434008435 9780434008438
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Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
June 2001, Basic Books
in English
0465006957 9780465006953
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Book Details
First Sentence
"A neighbor in the village tells me that I should protect myself against witches."
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- Created April 30, 2008
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August 12, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 14, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Linked existing covers to the edition. |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |