Supernatural belief presents an explanatory challenge to evolutionary theorists-it is both costly and prevalent. One influential functional explanation claims that the imagined threat of supernatural punishment can suppress selfishness and enhance cooperation. Specifically, morally concerned supreme deities or 'moralizing high gods' have been argued to reduce free-riding in large social groups,...

We present a theory of the creativity of dreams as well as psychopathology of religious delusions with respect to production of fundamental forms of religious cognition-specifically supernatural agent (SA) cognitions. We suggest that dream cognitions are particularly efficient at producing highly memorable and impactful experiences with SAs because dreams involve three processes that are prereq...

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of r...

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of r...

parapsychology, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have considered, by physicists and philosophers,by institutes which formed ,and in the twentieth century, especially during the post-modern age, as means of critic and break the materialistic and physicalistic view of modernity, is more important. review this subject ,in the islamic culture,breasting our with  researches  of avesina th...

Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psyc...

background: to evaluate public perceptions towards the causes of depression and schizophrenia and identifications of fac­tors resulting stigma towards mental ill. method: a cross-sectional study was conducted among the inhabitants of pulau-pinang, malaysia in march, 2009. a 24-item questionnaire was used to obtain respondent views. a non-probability (i.e convenient sampling method) was used to ...