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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... ritual ] . ” Frazer continued along these lines at great length , attempting to demon- strate that " the conception of a dying and risen god " has been popular in all the early civilizations “ from time immemorial . " He ended by ...
... ritual cannibalism with the Christian sacrament of communion . Others have made much of the fact that the story of Christ's Nativity is but one of many in which a God impregnates a human female . But seldom has anyone with respectable ...
... rituals and sacrifices, but they were not very loving and more often seem to have pro- voked anxiety than to have been loved. Consequently, Greco-Roman soci- eties proved very vulnerable to an influx of loving deities from elsewhere ...
... ritual, not of divinity, so why waste time on images of God? Such views reflect the fact that for much of the twentieth century, the social-scientific study of religion was essentially a Godless field. Not only because so many ...
... rituals are the fundamental stuff of religion . In a book review written in 1886 of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology , Durkheim32 condemned Spencer for reducing religion " to being merely a collection of beliefs and practices ...
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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 |