For the last two or three decades new and alternative religions have been at the center of heated controversy in the United States as various advocates have debated the desirability of curbing the operations of leaders and organizations that, many believe, have abused their followers and constitute a real threat to society. This controversy has spread to the scholarly community that studies thi...

Through the first millennium BCE, religio-cultural revolutions occurred in China, Greece, Israel, and India. Commonly referred to as the Axial Age, this epoch has been identified by some scholars as period of parallel evolution in which many of the World Religions appeared for the first time and humanity was forever changed. Axial scholarship, however, remains in an early stage as many social s...

Local belief systems such as indigenous religions and social taboos have been credited with helping to conserve animal and plant species and particular sites worldwide. Certain species and sites are protected because they are considered sacred. Although the meaning of sacred varies across cultures, religions, and languages, in general sacred entities are distinguished from the everyday world an...

This paper explores the ethical underpinnings found in Christianity and Daoism which can be applied to an ecological attitude. The purpose of this project is to shed some light on the contributing or undermining relationship that religious beliefs have toward environmental ethics. As shown in the paper, this relationship is diverse, and at times ambiguous due to the diversity of positions taken...

Theories of religion that are supported with selected examples can be criticized for selection bias. This paper evaluates major evolutionary hypotheses about religion with a random sample of 35 religions drawn from a 16-volume encyclopedia of world religions. The results are supportive of the group-level adaptation hypothesis developed in Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature ...

All the world's religions recommend a period of fasting, and of these, one whole month of intermittent fasting every year is particular to Islam. Muslims have two meals, one immediately after sunset and the other just before dawn with a period of fasting ranging from 11-18 hours. Therefore, we can assume that physiological changes occurring during Ramadan would be different from those occurring...