Drawing insights from the anthropologist Mary Douglas this lecture discusses the criteria across religious traditions that set apart the ritually pure from the impure. Mary Douglas has carried out elaborate study on the Book of Leviticus of the Hebrew Scriptures examining the meaning of ritual purity. ‘Anomaly’ is the key word. For instance, body fluids (blood, feces, urine, saliva) out of the body particularly if they are still touching the body are anomalous – they are not expected to be there – hence they render the body impure. Someone else touching the impure body would render them impure too.
There are degrees of purity: A Brahmin going to offer sacrifice in the temple is expected to possess the highest status of purity as compared to when he is at home not on duty at the temple. For instance, not to have sex before the worship. However, even at home he […]
Author: selvam
Lecture 11: Shamanism
Lecture 12: An Overview of Contributors to Phenom. of Religion
5 Cognitive Science of Religion
The valuable contribution of cognitive science of religion is the insight on the propensity of the human mind for dealing with supernatural agents, and their ability for access to the human mind. Science has the expertise on nature. These insights on nature serve as a platform for further understanding religious phenomena and truth-claims.
Cognitive Science of Religion has been often, according to Barrett (2007, p.12) falsely, associated with an anti-religious agenda. Dawkins (2006), for instance, uses the same findings in his effort to free the world of religious thought. There are others who scorn the possibility of applying the findings of evolutionary science to religion (Pinker, 2006).
Bering and Johnson (2005) justify the existence of the cognitive hardware described above, by pointing out to the logic of the adaptive process, in the language of evolution:
We have inherited the general template for religiosity because those early humans who abandoned the prospect of supernatural […]
Lecture 1: What is Positive Psychology?
Positive psychology: Its sources and contents
In 1998, when Martin Seligman was elected as the president of the American Psychology Association (APA) he extended a clarion call to psychology to focus on wellbeing and happiness as it does on pathology and psychological disorder (Seligman, 1999). The stream of psychological accent that followed is referred to as ‘positive psychology’. This is not a new school of psychology but only a new movement. It draws its sources from the history of psychology; and its interests are similar to that of humanistic psychology, but it differs sharply from it in that positive psychology embraces an empirical approach. It is the focus on existential questions with an empirical grounding that makes positive psychology unique (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 13; see also Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001).
For a long time, psychology was focused on understanding, treating and preventing psychological disorder. The positive psychology movement challenges this […]