Posted in history, humor, religion on Jan 16th, 2008 2 Comments »
Who was Cain’s wife? Okay, old conundrum for the literalists in the monotheistic clans.
Candidates:
Eve–ruled out by all
sister–must be considered
Lilith (Adam’s first wife?)–must be considered pending one’s treatment of Lilith
pre-adamic beings–why not?
“If we now work totally from Scripture, without any personal prejudices or other extra-biblical ideas, then back at the beginning, when there was only the […]
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Found via Chris Harrison’s Interrogating Nature
Religion’s evolutionary landscape:
Counterintuition, commitment,
compassion, communion
Scott Atran
CNRS–Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France and Institute for Social
Research–University of Michigan
Ara Norenzayan
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
1. Introduction
In every society,1 there are
1. Widespread counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs
in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.)
2. Hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material
commitments to supernatural agents, that is, […]
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The essence of Mithen’s cathedral metaphor — that closed-off sectors of mental life became open to integration, cumulative speculation, and enthusiastic discovery — is most compelling. It surely describes a quantum leap in the flexibility and scope of consciousness that does, indeed, make sense of the cultural explosion of the period 40k to 10k, B.P. […]
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Juan Cole highlights an interesting story about primal genetics and the history (of what I term,) the ‘genetic tribes’. This subject interests me and has so ever since Abdullah Ibrahim (The South African composer and pianist,) delineated on a napkin the migration of musical form along ‘ancient pathways’.
History and Genetics in Madagascar
Genetics and history have […]
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