Details
This hugely ambitious book searches for the origins of religion in terms of both biological and cultural evolution. Robert Bellah identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. He draws together the great religions of Greece, Israel China and India, demonstrating the common evolutionary roots of what may on the surface appear quite different religions.