The Philosophical Critique of Religion under the Early Empire

Attridge, Harold W.; Haase, Wolfgang

doi:10.1515/9783110854503-004

Cited by 6 publications

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“…1 and 1.3). For the Greeks, however, morality was the purview of the philosophers who criticized Greek religion precisely for its lack of concern with morality (Attridge 1978;Price 1999, pp. 126 -42).…”

Section: Toward a New Scientific Study Of Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

2004

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Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival – such as predators, protectors, and prey – but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.

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Section: Toward a New Scientific Study Of Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

2004

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“…The question of what really matters in sacrifice, physical things offered or metaphysical dispositions and beliefs is as old as Plato, and it occurs again and again in classical literature and on into late antiquity (for examples, see Attridge 1978; Ullucci 2012: 31-64). This question also played a major role in early Christian theology and apologetics, in which early Christian writers argued that Christianity was superior to traditional Mediterranean religions, Judean religion included, because it offered pure, spiritual worship, which is what God really wanted, not empty and meaningless sacrifice.…”

Section: Discourse On Sacrificementioning

confidence: 99%

Sacrifice in the Ancient Mediterranean: Recent and Current Research

Ullucci

2015

Currents in Biblical Research

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This essay provides a summary and critical assessment of scholarship on sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean over the last two decades. It focuses on Greek, Roman, Judean and Christian evidence from approximately the eighth century bce to the fifth century ce. Significant attention is paid to theoretical models, which have deeply affected the study of sacrifice. Archeological evidence for sacrifice is considered. The following areas of current scholarly debate are addressed and assessed: (1) the reach and role of religious experts;(2) sacrifice as communication and failed sacrifice; (3) the notion of spiritualization; (4) metaphorical and symbolic uses of sacrifice; and (5) sacrifice and identity. Sacrifice is theorized not as a static category or ontological thing, but a nexus of competitive ritualizations and/or discursive claims, the boundaries of which were actively contested by ancient practitioners and cultural producers.

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What Is an Apology? Christian Apologies and the So-Called Second Sophistic

Nasrallah

Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture

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The Philosophical Critique of Religion under the Early Empire

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

Sacrifice in the Ancient Mediterranean: Recent and Current Research

What Is an Apology? Christian Apologies and the So-Called Second Sophistic

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