Book Description
How religion evolved as a survival mechanism and its genetic base. How religion is hard-wired into Man through various neurological and physiological processes. Why the recent crisis of religion threatens society and causes individual mental distress. The common features found in alien abduction episodes, near death experiences, drug-induced trances, complimentary medicine and witchcraft. The links between the religion of our hominid ancestors and human belief systems ranging from the rituals of the Plains Indians to modern charismatic Christianity and the Toronto Blessing.
From the Publisher
Edmund Law read Anthropology at Cambridge University and is now an international lecturer and author on religion. His work has been featured by the BBC and RTE and in various national and specialist press articles. This book is the result of twenty years of first-hand investigation into religious behaviour around the world.
From the Author
In this book I show how religion is Man's defining characteristic and a fundamental biological and social fact. It establishes that there is a natural history of religion and then illustrates how this evolved and why. I draw on my twenty years experiences of first-hand encounters with a wide range of religious groups from charismatic Christians to victims of alien abductions.
Excerpted from The Religious Ape In Crisis by Edmund Law. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
My contention is simply that there is a genetic component to the religious tendency of Homo sapiens, in other words that it was selected for evolutionary benefit and is represented in our genome. Mankind has always subliminally known this fact about himself but in the pre-scientific world the only word to describe it was by reference to Man's 'spirit'.
