Dynamique
04-15-2009, 05:21 PM
The "disembodied spirit beings" thread and the reparte it spawned brought this article to mind. It was published in Discover magazine in August 2005, and it has some useful insights as to the origins of monotheistic, male-dominated religions such as Judiasim, Islam and Christianity. It also addresses why Western civilization follows these religions and not female-based, multi-god religions found in the tropics.
It takes a while to get there, but it's worth the read.
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Are the Desert People Winning?
Anthropologists say all the world's cultures fall into two basic groups: those from forests and those from arid lands. Increasingly, the future looks treeless.
My desk, like the desk of most research scientists, sees an overwhelming traffic of scholarly journals and articles—reams of pages of the latest cutting-edge discoveries, destined to be outdated before next week. But one study, A Cross-Cultural Summary, written in 1967 by the Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor, has remained firmly planted there for some time now—and not only because, at 3,000 pages long, it’s rather hard to pick up and move. Textor’s massive tome contains a cultural correlation that bears disquietingly on the type of planet we humans have produced for ourselves today, and my mind turns to it more and more of late.
...
https://discovermagazine.com/2005/aug/desert-people/?searchterm=religion%20desert
It takes a while to get there, but it's worth the read.
------------
Are the Desert People Winning?
Anthropologists say all the world's cultures fall into two basic groups: those from forests and those from arid lands. Increasingly, the future looks treeless.
My desk, like the desk of most research scientists, sees an overwhelming traffic of scholarly journals and articles—reams of pages of the latest cutting-edge discoveries, destined to be outdated before next week. But one study, A Cross-Cultural Summary, written in 1967 by the Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor, has remained firmly planted there for some time now—and not only because, at 3,000 pages long, it’s rather hard to pick up and move. Textor’s massive tome contains a cultural correlation that bears disquietingly on the type of planet we humans have produced for ourselves today, and my mind turns to it more and more of late.
...
https://discovermagazine.com/2005/aug/desert-people/?searchterm=religion%20desert