Anthroposophy as religious syncretism

Cultural Diversity, Religious Syncretism and People of India: An Anthropological Interpretation

Ethnic origins, religions, and languages are the major sources of cultural diversity. India is a country incredible for its diversity; biological and cultural. However, the process of synthesis and integration has been extensively at work in most parts of India. Indeed ethnic identities and even the culture traits of Indian people have never been frozen in time or in space, they have been in st...

Jewish Teenagers’ Syncretism

Inflectional Syncretism And Corpora

This paper describes a novel undertaking: comparing the relationship between grammatical ambiguity (syncretism) in nouns, as represented in a default inheritance hierarchy, with textual frequency distributions. In order to do this we consider a language with a reasonable number of grammatical distinctions and where syncretism occurs in different morphological classes. We investigated this relat...

Religious Concepts as Necessary Components of the Adaptive Religious System

The majority view of cognitive scientists of religion holds that religious concepts are merely byproducts of evolved minds. However, religious concepts exhibit patterned socioecological variation, suggesting that they may be responsive to local selective pressures. Concepts worthy of religious devotion are intriguing, emotion-triggering, and framed in such a way that makes them relevant to one’...

Religious belief as compensatory control.

The authors review experimental evidence that religious conviction can be a defensive source of compensatory control when personal or external sources of control are low. They show evidence that (a) belief in religious deities and secular institutions can serve as external forms of control that can compensate for manipulations that lower personal control and (b) religious conviction can also se...