http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomJournal for the Cognitive Science of Religion2023-09-19T13:26:55+00:00Armin W. Geertzawg@cas.au.dkOpen Journal Systems<p><em>Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion</em> is the official journal of the <a href="https://iacesr.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion</a> (IACESR)<a href="https://iacesr.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">.</a> The Association was founded in 2006 and since then has sponsored a number of international collaborative projects and biennial conferences.</p>http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/26061Vastness as an Embodied Representation of Existential Concepts2024-01-08T16:36:10+00:00Mary Harmon-VukićKate Spitalnic
<p style="font-weight: 400;">This project explores the nature of the representation of non-agentic qualities that are associated with the Christian God (e.g., peace, love, joy, existence, unity, etc.). Specifically, we propose that these existential words maintain an embodied representation that involves visuo-spatial vastness. In four experiments, participants saw an image followed by words and non-words. The words were either existential words (e.g., peace, hope, unity, joy, etc.) or positively-valenced abstract concepts (e.g., luck, wealth, success, fun, etc.). Participants indicated whether the string of letters was a word or not by pressing a “yes” or “no” key as quickly as possible. Response times were recorded. In Experiments 1 and 2, images of nature depicting visuo-spatial vastness or close-up images of nature, respectively, facilitated responses to existential words compared to control words. However, in Experiment 3, when the images were presented for a much briefer duration (i.e., 250 msecs), only vast images facilitated responses to existential words. Finally, Experiments 4A and 4B demonstrated that the priming effect between vast images and existential words varied as a function of posture. Specifically, the facilitation to existential words following vast images remained when participants maintained a vast posture (i.e., arms open) but was eliminated with a constricted posture (e.g., arms crossed). The overall pattern of results across the four experiments supports the notion that existential words are associated with visuo-spatial, and perhaps, proprioceptive vastness. The results hint at the possibility that vastness is an important component of the embodied representation of existential concepts and may also relate to the representation of the Christian God.</p>
2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/23578Religion Devolving?2023-06-26T07:52:54+00:00F. LeRon Shults
<p>This article highlights several of the valuable contributions in <em>Religion Evolving</em> by Benjamin Purzycki and Richard Sosis (2022) and offers some material and methodological reflections that are intended to complement their efforts. Their book offers a clear and useful operationalization of religion, emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomena in question, and makes great strides in overcoming the polarizing debate between proponents of the “by-product” and “adaptationist” camps in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion. The bulk of the current article argues for the importance of building on their efforts by also attending to the conditions under which – and the mechanisms by which – religion can become “maladaptive” in contemporary contexts.</p>
2023-06-26T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22811Raising the Buddha’s Hand2024-01-08T16:36:14+00:00Piotr SzymanekMatylda Ciołkosz
<p>Deity yoga is a practice found in Tibetan Buddhism involving visualizations that have the normative goal of “becoming one” with a supernatural being. During the practice, practitioners report experiencing that their own body transforms into the body of the deity. This paper offers a potential cognitive explanation of how such an experience is possible. Applying findings from cognitive science on the phenomenon of illusory ownership, we argue that the practice of deity yoga has the necessary means to cause an experience analogous to the famous “rubber hand illusion” in which one misattributes their ownership to a fake hand. In this paper, we 1) introduce deity yoga practice and its key aspects; 2) discuss illusory ownership and its explanation embedded in a predictive processing framework; 3) argue that visualization in deity yoga may induce the experience of illusory ownership; and 4) conclude with a short discussion of the hypothesis’ limitations and of ways to test our hypothesis. Overall, the paper suggests how the practice of visualization in deity yoga may lead to an experience of a transfer of identity onto an imagined supernatural agent.</p>
2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/26507Embodiment, Deity Yoga, Cognitive and Evolutionary Approaches to Religion2024-01-08T16:36:05+00:00Armin W Geertz2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18776The Attraction of Religion: A New Evolutionary Psychology of Religion, edited by Jason D. Slone and James A. Van Slyke.2021-08-03T10:44:16+00:00Ismael Apud
<p>The Attraction of Religion: A New Evolutionary Psychology of Religion, edited by Jason D. Slone and James A. Van Slyke. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. xvi, 252 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1350005280</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18788Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World, by Clay Routledge.2021-08-03T10:44:15+00:00Siria Kohonen
<p>Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World, by Clay Routledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 216pp., $29.95, ISBN 9780190629427</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/19502Hearing Voices, Interpreting Words2021-08-05T09:27:36+00:00Mark Q. Gardiner
<p>In this commentary I will be exploring a number of implications that McCauley and Graham’s theses about the interrelationship of normal, religious, and mentally disordered cognition have for an interpretative methodology that has been fruitfully utilized by empirically-oriented scholars of religion. I argue that that methodology imposes some important constraints on the type of theorizing McCauley and Graham propose, and that their findings in turn suggest some important modifications to that methodology.</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/19559The Processes of Believing, Mental Abnormalities, and Other Matters of the Mind2021-08-05T10:22:45+00:00Rüdiger J. SeitzHans-Ferdinand AngelRaymond F. Paloutzian
<p>Two categories of mental events – ecstatic or indescribable religious revelations and bizarre beliefs or behavior with related mental abnormalities – have been compared and contrasted in order to understand whether they are manifestations of different basic neural and psychological processes, or fundamentally the same. In popular terms, such comparisons point to the issue of the relationship between being religious and being mentally ill. McCauley and Graham (2020) have argued for a benign “maturational naturalism” (MN) as an over-arching concept to subsume and understand the two approaches. MN rests on the assumption that for purposes of understanding the processes that mediate any “matters of the mind,” it makes no difference whether they are labeled religious or not. All must be functions of maturationally natural processes, or else they would not occur. Whether they are labeled “religious” or “mental illness,” or whether an extra-world agent or spirit was involved, is left for others to discuss. There is a gap in their analysis, however: They refer to beliefs (religious, delusional, evidence-based), but do not adequately clarify the processes from which they spring or what believing is even for. The present article completes the picture by explaining the fundamental processes of believing that underpin all they say, and more. The keyword for the processes of believing is the term credition, a neologistic variant of credible or believable. This article elaborates how believing processes make possible religious, esoteric, and logical and evidence-based beliefs; where they come from and how they are constructed: and what they are good for, i.e., why humans do what is called believing at all.</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/19803Religious Experiences Are Interpreted through Priors from Cultural Frameworks Supported by Imaginative Capacity Rather Than Special Cognition2021-08-05T09:31:51+00:00Valerie van MulukomMartin Lang
<p>In this commentary of McCauley and Graham’s book on mental abnormalities and religions, we identify a number of challenges, and present possible extensions of their proposed research. Specifically, we argue that no specialized religious cognition should be assumed, and instead suggest that the cases of mental abnormalities discussed in the book specify particular instances of religious content, and that other disorders may show a more causal relationship to religiosity. We argue that the discussed religious content may be best explained in the context of cultural frameworks and their contribution to experiencing the world through priors and predictive processing. Moreover, cognition required to understand and engage with religion, but not special to it, might crucially involve our capacity for imagination, supported by memory. Disorders in imagination are therefore expected to show likewise dysfunctions in religious phenomena.</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/19935Naturalism, Religion, and Mental Disorders2023-05-31T09:42:42+00:00Daniel Cohen
<p>This article explores the analysis developed in the book, Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us about Religions, by Robert N. McCauley and George Graham. In the book, the authors develop a model of the relationship between religious cognition and cognition associated with mental illness. Their model is based on the longstanding consensus that many classical mystical experiences appear to overlap phenomenologically with pathological states. This article argues that the model presented in the book, while compelling, could be strengthened by extending it to include discussion not only of the cognitive association between religious experiences and mental disorders, but also about how religious cognitions can similarly be associated with mental wellness. Such occurrences are seen, for example, in the positive mental health outcomes that can be associated with the religious/spiritual experiences of mystics, in contrast to the negative outcomes experienced by psychotics.</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/20215Corrigendum2023-05-31T09:38:00+00:00Nathalie Hallin
<p>Hallin, N., Västfjäll, D., & Andersson, G. (2020). Bias against atheists and religious persons in Sweden. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion 5(2), 205–223. https://doi.org/10.1558/jcsr.41002. The article erroneously states on page 215: “Swedish participants made significantly fewer conjunction errors than Finnish participants when the target was atheist.” The correct text should read: “Swedish participants made significantly more conjunction errors than Finnish participants when the target was atheist."</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/20676Can Science Explain Religion? The Cognitive Science Debate, by James W. Jones.2023-05-31T09:39:38+00:00Halvor Kvandal
<p>Can Science Explain Religion? The Cognitive Science Debate, by James W. Jones. Oxford University Press, 2015. 236 + xii pp. Hb., $31.95. ISBN: 9780190249380</p>
2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/26333Towards Synthesis2024-01-08T16:36:06+00:00Lauritz Holm Petersen
<p><em>The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion</em>, edited by Yair Lior and Justin Lane. London and New York: Routledge, 2023. xv + 523 pages, $163.22. ISBN: 9781138331679</p>
2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/26235Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion, by Gabriel Levy2024-01-08T16:36:08+00:00Anastasiia Shabalina
<p><em>Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion</em>, by Gabriel Levy. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022. xiii + 249 pages, $45.00. ISBN: 9780262543248</p>
2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/26228Somethings New and Somethings Old2024-01-08T16:36:09+00:00Armin W Geertz
<p><em>The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion</em>, edited by James R. Liddle and Todd K. Shackelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xii + 386 pages, £115.00. ISBN: 9780199397747</p>
2023-06-20T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22038Representing Group Rituals2023-01-23T16:00:46+00:00Idhamsyah Eka Putra
<p>In Harvey Whitehouse’s book (2021), he argues that humans are ritual animals, and that rituals can be the glue shaping group bonds. <br />Whitehouse argues further that rituals are embedded in our routines and have become habitual. In this article, I add the idea of embodiment and social representations as a supplement to Whitehouse’s studies of rituals, group identities, and their interactions in society. In my view, these ideas may answer the following questions: 1) why people still practice group rituals, even though they are not attached to the group; 2) why people are ready to die defending their group even though they are not active in the community and rarely practice group rituals; and 3) why people are so fanatical about their religion that they are ready to die defending it, and how to alleviate such fanaticism.</p>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22389Rituals, Music, and the Landscape Metaphor2022-11-16T12:14:22+00:00Dor ShiltonEva Jablonka
<p>In this commentary, we discuss two aspects of The Ritual Animal’s (2021) rich and multidimensional framework which may be further developed: the role of music and euphoric rituals within Harvey Whitehouse’s modes theory, and the use of the landscape model for studying sociocultural systems. We note the strong, cross-cultural association of music and religious rituals, consider the suitability of music for such practices, and suggest further research on how the use of music may accommodate both imagistic and doctrinal rituals. We then describe the social landscape model used by Whitehouse and consider his proposal to extend the model through the consideration of multiple landscapes at different levels. We accept his suggestion to explicitly include underlying and overlying networks of inputs but argue that since the interacting networks are not external to but constitutive of the landscape, a single landscape with multiple causal, constraining, and constitutive networks may better capture the integrated nature of social systems.</p>
2022-10-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22542Doctrines of Neolithic Religiosity2022-11-16T12:13:38+00:00Trevor Watkins
<p>As a prehistoric archaeologist working on the Neolithic of southwest Asia, I focus on Harvey Whitehouse’s evolutionary theory of the emergence of the doctrinal mode of religiosity in the context of the emergence of “agricultural intensity” and “social inequality” in the Neolithic period, and quite specifically in the latest phase of the occupation of the settlement of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. I find those difficult phrases ill-defined in the book, and in the author’s published papers on which the book depends. And I contend that the evidence for intensive agricultural production and of institutionalized social inequality is to be found post-Neolithic and associated with the emergence of the first urban societies. I believe that Whitehouse’s idea of the emergence of doctrinal religiosity needs to be argued in the context of the earliest (literate) civilizations of southern Mesopotamia and Egypt.</p>
2022-10-03T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22039An Overview of Harvey Whitehouse’s The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity (2021)2022-11-16T12:14:39+00:00Robert Jagiello
<p>In the book The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity (2021), Harvey Whitehouse presents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of ritual that is remarkable in range and versatility. Embedded in evolutionary principles, his theories hold vast explanatory potential, asking pertinent questions about the evolutionary functions and psychological substrates of ritual behaviour and its pivotal role in the origins of cultural and social complexity. Moreover, he compellingly discusses how the research outlined, resulting from many collaborations over several decades, can serve as a basis for meaningful policy making as well as the bridging of various fields within academia, hence demonstrating its potential for making contributions toward some of the most pressing issues currently faced by humanity.</p>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22515How Ritual an Animal? Harvey Whitehouse on Ritual, Trust, and Cooperation2022-11-16T12:13:59+00:00Kim Sterelny
<p>Harvey Whitehouse documents the great variety of ritual in human life, while offering a unified framework. Ritual’s essential social role is to support social cohesion and cooperation, but it does so via distinct mechanisms: through social fusion and through social identification. For, despite variation, ritual clusters at two poles: rare, intense, often aversive rituals; and frequent, low arousal rituals. Those frequent rituals operate through social identification primed by mutual recognition of common doctrine. In principle, this mechanism is scale independent. Rare, intense rituals generate cohesion through social fusion, itself triggered by shared, congruent autobiographical memory. This is intrinsically a small-scale mechanism. In this paper, I (i) argue that cost-based analyses of the function of ritual have a larger scope than Whitehouse supposes, (ii) offer a modified view of social fusion and the role of autobiographical memory, and (iii) argue that the primary upshot of doctrinal ritual is the legitimation of hierarchy rather than social cohesion over large social scales.</p>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/22679Cognitively Accessible Words Associated with God as Effective Lexical Primes2022-11-23T16:08:20+00:00Michael B KitchensIsabella M LangSydney E PetrasicBrian C RemperBrittany M Wilson
<p>Do the words used to prime the concept of God in psychology of religion research studies accurately reflect a mental representation of God? To examine this, two samples completed a free-association task, where they listed 10 words that came to mind when they thought about God (Studies 1a–1b). We found that more than half of the lexical primes used in previous studies were rarely or never produced (< 5 times) in the 2,610 free-association responses. Using a false memory paradigm, Study 2 revealed that the most frequent free-association words produced in Studies 1a and 1b more effectively primed the concept of God than a set of prime words used in previous religious priming studies that were not frequent free-association words in Studies 1a and 1b. This research advances the methodological practices in religious priming research and contributes to an understanding of people’s thoughts about God.</p>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/23448Ritual Animals also Require Pedagogy, Communication, and Social Reasoning2022-11-16T12:11:39+00:00Radu Umbreș
<p>Harvey Whitehouse offers a complex and stimulating theory of rituals that bind people together and propagate via affiliative imitation. The Ritual Animal argues that fundamental problems of group cooperation can be solved by causally opaque and goal-demoted behaviors which produce arbitrary cultural conventions, honest signals of membership, and collective fused identities. This amply evidenced and compelling account explains a broad variety of prominent examples, yet other key causal mechanisms emerge from the ethnographic literature and analytical reflection on affiliation and groups. Taking a glance at some widespread and unusual rituals, this paper highlights the importance of cultural transmission via pedagogy with or without copying, costly signaling and coordination without coalitional groups, and meta-representations of impenetrable ritual efficacy. Future research can explain how bonding rituals become central features of social interaction without relying upon a quite debatable adaptive function of ritual behavior for cooperation – or anything else.</p>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/23612The (Most) Algorithmic Animal2022-11-16T12:11:19+00:00Joanna J Bryson
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>Rituals are a means of regulation – they are a means for maintaining coherence and attaining long-term goals, including social coherence. But does their efficacy depend entirely, or at all, on their opacity? In this requested commentary on Harvey Whitehouse’s new book, The Ritual Animal, I discuss the utility of costly rituals in an evolutionary context, and suggest that causal opacity is only one, potentially substitutable cost. I relate this to the urgent topical concerns of polarization and of regulating sustainability globally.</p> </div> </div> </div>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/23748The Ritual Animal2022-11-16T12:10:34+00:00Harvey Whitehouse
<p>This is a response to six reviews of The Ritual Animal (Whitehouse, 2021). The reviews covered a wide range of topics, from evolutionary theory (e.g., Bryson; Shilton and Jablonka), to group psychology (e.g., Putra) and development (e.g., Umbres), and the evidence from archaeology and deep history on the role of ritual in the evolution of socio-political complexity (e.g., Watkins). Some of the reviewers spanned all these topics in various ways (e.g., Sterelny). I am grateful for the high quality of engagement and the many generous remarks. Although I also disagree with some of the arguments advanced in the reviews, I argue that they have collectively opened up a variety of important questions worthy of further research.</p>
2022-11-16T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18971Editorial Note2021-01-15T16:01:37+00:00Armin W. Geertz
<p>.</p>
2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18973The Nordic Issue2021-01-15T16:02:06+00:00Ingela Visuri
<p>.</p>
2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18974Peering into the Minds of Gods2021-04-13T10:34:57+00:00Theiss BendixenBenjamin Grant Purzycki
<p>Cross-cultural beliefs about gods’ concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods’ concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the “god-problem problem”: to the extent that gods are concerned with local socioecological problems, which criteria does a problem need to satisfy in order to become an object of supernatural attention? We offer some preliminary solutions to this puzzle, which leads to a related, but often-overlooked, question: granted that features of religions may culturally evolve to adaptively fit to and resolve aspects of the local socioecological environment, what are the psychological processes through which this adaptation could occur? We wager that in order to answer the question satisfactorily, contemporary evolutionary approaches need to work together. Psychologically, the socioecological environment provides the initial impetus for a belief or practice by increasing the cognitive salience of a corresponding local problem and its costs. This increased receptivity makes such ideas and corollary behaviors easier to learn and transmit along the routes posited by dual-inheritance theorists. Behaviors feed back to beliefs and can offset the costs of social life in a variety of ways. As such, examining how cognition, social learning, behavior, and ecological pressures inform each other is especially crucial for understanding the persistence, diffusion, and evolution of religious ideas and practices.</p>
2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18976The Wraths of Fire2021-01-25T13:52:30+00:00Siria Kohonen
<p>The way people understand and encounter illnesses include influences from human cognition as well as from their cultural surroundings. A conception of illness termed “the wraths of fire” (tulen vihat in Finnish) was a general explanation for severe skin burns in early modern Finland and Karelia, and it included ideas about personified fire and its magically contagious essence. However, the academic conversation on this notion has mostly concentrated on the socio-cultural influences behind it. In this article, I argue that the intuitive level of human cognition (e.g., Kahneman and Frederick 2005; Evans and Frankish 2009) has formed the basic guidelines for this conception of illness. The research materials consist of approximately six hundred archive units of narrated memories on healing events and healing instructions. As the materials are not based on empirical observations by the author, the article also introduces certain methodological questions important for connecting the cognitive perspective with historical materials, such as questions on the reliability of the descriptions of past events.</p>
2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18978The Contagious Muhammad2022-12-02T23:33:07+00:00Jonas Svensson
<p>This article utilizes a cognitive science of religion framework in approaching the cultural phenomena of relics from the prophet Muhammad in Islamic tradition. The basic arguments are that a contagion aspiration system that underlies the phenomenon of relics in general could hypothetically be construed as an evolutionary exaptation of a contagion avoidance system within a framework of social learning, and that the specific phenomenon of relics can be seen as a by-product of this exaptation. This explanatory model is used to make sense of two specific complexes of beliefs and practices: (1) the notion that physical contact with prophetic relics results in transfer substance, baraka, with this-worldly beneficial effect, and (2) the fact that prophetic relics throughout history has been used by political and religious dignitaries as a means to boost social prestige and authority.</p>
2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.http://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCSR/article/view/18979Bias against Atheists and Religious Persons in Sweden2021-01-25T14:15:03+00:00Nathalie HallinDaniel VästfjällGerhard Andersson
<p>Religion is viewed as necessary for moral behaviour in many parts of the world. Today, however, many societies are becoming more secular and the view of atheists as immoral might therefore change. This study investigated anti-atheist and anti-religious bias in Sweden, by replicating Gervais et al. (2017). The study used an online version of the conjunction fallacy test, which investigates whether a description, in this case of extremely immoral behaviour, is viewed as representative of a category or group. In this study we chose atheists and religious believers as targets. The sample consisted of 268 Swedish participants. The results showed no significant difference between conditions. However, the anti-atheist bias was lower than in the original American sample from the replicated study, while the anti-religious bias was higher. Further research can investigate differences between cultures, using the conjunction fallacy test.</p>
2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Equinox Publishing Ltd.