Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of BeliefHarper Collins, 2 µ.¤. 2007 - 496 ˹éÒ Discovering God is a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone Age to the Modern Age. Sociologist Rodney Stark surveys the birth and growth of religions around the world—from the prehistoric era of primal beliefs; the history of the pyramids found in Iraq, Egypt, Mexico, and Cambodia; and the great "Axial Age" of Plato, Zoroaster, Confucius, and the Buddha, to the modern Christian missions and the global spread of Islam. He argues for a free-market theory of religion and for the controversial thesis that under the best, unimpeded conditions, the true, most authentic religions will survive and thrive. Among his many conclusions:
Most people believe in the existence of God (or Gods), and this has apparently been so throughout human history. Many modern biologists and psychologists reject these spiritual ideas, especially those about the existence of God, as delusional. They claim that religion is a primitive survival mechanism that should have been discarded as humans evolved beyond the stage where belief in God served any useful purpose—that in modern societies, faith is a misleading crutch and an impediment to reason. In Discovering God, award-winning sociologist Rodney Stark responds to this position, arguing that it is our capacity to understand God that has evolved—that humans now know much more about God than they did in ancient times. |
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... early in the 1980s when I wrote a chapter on the “Evolution of the Gods.”12 Today my answer is quite different, as should be evident from the title of this book, which refers to the discovery, not to the evolution of God. Of course ...
... early Judaism.29 To more plausibly picture God as rational and loving, it is helpful to assume the existence of other, if far lesser, divine beings. That is, evil supernatural creatures such as Satan are essential. In this manner Zo ...
... early civilizations—Sumer, Egypt, Greece, and Mesoamerica. Why did these civilizations turn from the High Gods of more primitive times and embrace idols and an image of the Gods as essentially human beings, except for being immortal and ...
... early Jesus Movement, the chapter turns to an estimated growth curve that shows the number of Christians within the empire at various times between the years 40 and 350—a curve that is validated by comparison with known statistics such ...
... early Neolithic (New Stone Age) sites such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey,2 there is some evidence that bulls may have been sacred, and here and there archaeologists have found small figurines that might have represented a very ample mother ...
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Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief Rodney Stark ªÁºÒ§Êèǹ¢Í§Ë¹Ñ§Ê×Í - 2009 |
Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief Rodney Stark ªÁºÒ§Êèǹ¢Í§Ë¹Ñ§Ê×Í - 2009 |