Abstract Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive monitoring gods care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest belief supernatural punishment generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect a deity's explicitly postulated concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report pre-registere...

the religious testaments and presentday statements on human personality. The schism is only partly due to the need for specialisation of knowledge, and even as late as the twelfth century Moses Maimonides, living in Spain and writing in Arabic, was physician, philosopher, mathematician, and biblical commentator. The ghettos in Central Europe, in contrast, were created in a culture which separat...

We have already stated summarily what the punishment should be for temple-robbing, whether by open force or secretly. But the punishments for the various sorts of insolence in speech or action with regard to the gods, which a man can show in word or deed, have to be proclaimed after we have provided an exordium. Let this be it: "No one believing, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the g...