http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1499/2055
Once we realize this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion. What needs to be explained is the much more general question, how it is that we can act so much of the time towards visible people in terms of their invisible halo. The tool for this fundamental operation is the capacity for imagination. It is while searching for neurological evidence for the development of this capacity and of its social implications that we, in passing, will account for religious-like phenomena. Trying to understand how imagination can account for the transcendental social, and incidentally religion, is a quite different enterprise to accounting for the religious for itself in terms of modules, or core knowledge, which, in any case, we share with other primates. Unlike this, imagination does seem to distinguish us from chimpanzees and perhaps also distinguishes post-Upper Palaeolithic humans from their forebears. This is from a paper by Maurice Bloch. I have no problem in accepting imagination. I wonder what we should do about religious stupidity in the transcendental social and that stupidity that cannot distinguish the transcendental and transactional social domains? Less corruption in both would make life better. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
