The editorial in question repeatedly suggests that morals are derived from religious principles. This is a common misconception. Indeed, amoral and unethical behavior is often supported by religion; historical and contemporary examples are support for slavery and oppression of women and homosexuals. Moreover, numerous secular, nonreligious individuals and organizations (such as Doctors Without ...

in the 90s, a remarkable number of manuscripts were found in northern afghanistan, including economic documents, legal documents, and letters, which have become an important resource for academic studies. this paper aims to investigate the bactrian pantheon as reflected in the economic documents of this collection. at first, these economic documents and the pantheon mentioned in them are introd...

As appeals to what gods know and care about often motivate and rationalize human behavior, understanding shared models of gods’ minds is crucial for understanding religion’s contributions to human sociality. If religious systems function to minimize the effects of social and ecological problems, then models of gods’ concerns should coevolve with these problems. The present work assesses this pr...

According to Alexander’s [Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter] theory of morality, human social groups became large as a result of between-group competition over preferred habitats and resources, but although larger social groups are more successful in competition, they also experience more pressures to fission. Morality unites a society by limitin...

An infinity of gods collectively select a random natural number by each removing a finite number of balls from an urn in a reverse supertask. It is discussed whether this is an absurdity that indicates the impossibility of reverse supertasks.

One central feature of the God of Israel, highlighted in the holy Scriptures of the Jews, was that he had h)nq. The word means zeal, jealousy, and envy. In other words, Yahweh is a jealous God, envious of and zealous for all that belongs to him. He will give his glory to no other, “nor my praise to graven images”. 2 This God had now chosen Israel to be his people. The people, then, were to show...

Evolutionary thinking can be applied to both cultural microevolution and macroevolution. However, much of the current literature focuses on cultural microevolution. In this article, we argue that the growing availability of large cross-cultural datasets facilitates the use of computational methods derived from evolutionary biology to answer broad-scale questions about the major transitions in h...

Enki or Ea. is the name of the god of wisdom, medicine and sea in the Mesopotamia Sumer and Elam. He is the ruler of the freshwater ocean, “Abzu”. Enki is represented by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris flowing from his shoulders. He has a bowl in his hand from which water flows. He is associated with his symbolic animals such as fish, goats and turtles. Boats and canes with ram heads are his to...