Background: Traditional and indigenous communities in India are of the religious belief that medicinal groves and plants are sacred in nature. Sacred groves (SGs) are patches of trees on forest land that are protected communally with religious zeal and connotations. These forest areas have been protected since ages by traditional societies and indigenous communities with their socio-cultural an...

Religious belief in its most ideal form can be seen as a powerful force to create purposive transformations by transmitting ecologically positive habit of practice and attitudes of mind to succeeding generations that share similar religious beliefs. This concept assumes even greater significance on considering howmore than half of the world’s population embraces some sort of religious beliefs t...

During the special showing of the Holy Shroud at Turin in Spring 2010, an art exhibit at the Venaria Reale – the Savoy hunting palace just outside the city – will focus on Western artists’ interest in the body of Christ as subject. With works of painting and sculpture from the late Middle Ages to the Baroque period (and some earlier pieces), the exhibit will parallel the religious event, sheddi...

according to the importance of symbolism in mystical narratives, and of course to the existence of a need for them to be interpreted in order to understand the text and its narrative details, we have analyzed three authentic and effective works: initially tazkirat al-awliyā by attar, secondly kashf-ol-mahjoob by hojviri and at the end resaleh of ghoshairieh by ghoshairi through a semiotic appro...

The pattern of delusions in a cross-cultural hospital population was studied. It was found that there were cultural differences in persecutory, grandiose and religious, and sexual and fantastic delusions, accounted for mainly by the relatively higher frequencies in the African and West Indian cultural groups. These phenomena can be understood in terms of the cultural backgrounds of these groups...

In our comparative perspective we use six nation cultures to test if supernatural attributions differentiate religious and secular authority. Using semantic dimensions derived from Osgood, we empirically match the affective meaning of identities to the Christian concept of God with secular alter identities. The same mechanism is used to identify behaviors, emotions, and traits that are attribut...

The SpREUK questionnaire (SpREUK is an acronym of the German translation of "Spiritual and Religious Attitudes in Dealing with Illness") was developed to investigate how patients with chronic diseases living in secular societies view the impact of spirituality in their dealing with illness (in terms of reactive coping). The aim was to operationalize and quantify patients’ search for a transcend...

The cognitive science of religion integrates insights from diverse scientific disciplines to explain how people acquire, represent and transmit religious concepts. This perspective has led to a fruitful research program on the naturalistic origins of religion. However, it has thus far not directly addressed a key component of religion: faith or committed belief. The present review proposes a fr...