A scientist and non-believer, de Waal isn't saying here that religion is required for human morality, only that the two have been entwined throughout human history. Since I have wearied of the Richard Dawkins school of religion-bashing, in which belief is equated with dim-wittedness, I can only applaud de Waal's approach, as when he writes, "The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms ... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma."
- Frans de Waal's Bottom-Up Morality: We're Not Good Because Of God
Lai mēs labāk spētu izprast reliģijas kā multifaktoriālu fenomenu un to nozīmi ir nepieciešama interdisciplināra pieeja.
"For Mauss, belief was not a matter of construing and choosing but of the mode in which the human body, conscious as well as unconscious, exists. To put this point in less invidious terms, one might say that the secular attitude and experience, like the religious, requires particular social, psychological, biological conditions (I'm using Mauss's phrase). That the distinctive attitudes underlying secularism as a political arrangement presuppose particular hierarchies of the senses. Some culturally valorized senses are deliberately encouraged as objects of disciplinary projects, others emerge from the convergence of the political and economical developments and the regulatory strategies that they give rise to in modern industries, mass markets, cosmopolitain cities, modern transport and communications, capitalist corporations and modern warfare." - Talal Asad
"Religious behavior is particularly interesting because it does not follow normal forms of behavior, there is already something special, something rather odd about it. And what we are interested in is, finding out what is on about it. And whereas all this previous work was there, most of it was actually theoretical. So at a certain point it became obvious that if you are going to make points that you are going to make about the religion, you better, well, engage in experimental work." - Thomas E. Lawson + citi @ Levyna Project
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