Religious Beliefs in "Silambu"

Religious Beliefs, Religious Participation and Cooperation

The paper analyzes the relation between religious beliefs, religious participation and social cooperation. In particular, we focus on religions that instill beliefs about the connection between rewards and punishments and social behaviour. We show how religious organizations arise endogenously, analyze their e¤ect on social interactions in society and identify a "spiritual" as well as a "materi...

Medically valid religious beliefs.

Patient requests for "inappropriate" medical treatment (violations of the standard of care) based on religious beliefs should have special standing. Nevertheless, not all such requests should be honored, because some are morally disturbing. The trouble lies in deciding which ones count. This paper proposes criteria that would qualify a religious belief as medically valid to help physicians deci...

Disclosure of religious beliefs.

Surely after more than 200 years, psychiatry has become reasonably sophisticated and we can assume that there is no such thing as an unbiased comment. Professor Cooper's attack on Professor Casey for being 'a sincere member of the Roman Catholic Church' 1 is only justified if he also states, as the Editor does, that the other comment comes from Dr Oates, who is a 'representative of the pro-choi...

Paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs and personality correlates

The ecology of religious beliefs.

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we...