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Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict

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3 March 2014

Big Gods: 1. Watched people are nice people, 2. Religion is more in the situation than in the person, 3. Hell is stronger than heaven, 4. Trust people who trust in God, 5. Religious actions speak louder than words, 6. Unworshipped Gods are impotent Gods, 7. Big Gods for Big Groups, 8. Religious groups cooperate in order to compete.

Featuring

Thomas J. Coleman III

 

Ara Norenzayan

 

Ritual, Religion, and the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Culture

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24 February 2014

Cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald discusses the role of ritual in human evolution, and its continued importance in all forms of society and culture. In this interview, Professor Donald outlines his perspective on the evolution of human cognition, and the importance of both embodied communication and mind-sharing networks.

Featuring

Jack Tsonis

 

Merlin Donald

 

‘Religion is Natural and Science is Not’

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17 February 2014

Communicating with your favorite God or gods, forest spirit, or Jinn - easy. Postulating that the entire universe is held together by theorizing the process of quantum entanglement, informed from a personal commitment to philosophical a priories, which are based on measurements of the physical properties of said universe – harder.

Featuring

Thomas J. Coleman III

 

Robert N. McCauley

 

Religion as Anthropomorphism

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10 February 2014

In Stewart Guthrie’s interview with Thomas J. Coleman III for The Religious Studies Project, Guthrie begins by outlining what it means to ‘explain religion’. He defines anthropomorphism as “the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman events” and gives an example of this as applied to auditory and visual phenomena throughout the interview.

Featuring

Thomas J. Coleman III

 

Stewart Guthrie

 

Religious Education

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3 February 2014

For those of us in Britain the question of Religious Education (notionally 'Religious Studies at primary and secondary school level') has become an ever-increasing issue of concern. Just what exactly should RE entail? Should RE be teaching about religion or teaching religion? Who, even, should be RE teachers? In this interview, ...

Featuring

Jonathan Tuckett

 

Tim Jensen