COMMENT:Guthrie argues that "religion <em>is</em> anthropomorphism" and theorizes that humans are "meaning-making machines", prone to seek out and promote the highest-level abstractions possible; since humans are invariably the first things scanned for in a novel environment, and since human-like behavior offers seemingly the greatest explanatory power for unexplained phenomena, the development of anthropomorphism (with associated anthropocentrism) develops naturally into religious systems of belief. While anthropomorphism (the attribution of the human to the non-human) has been blithely recognized by skeptics (and acknowledged and avoided by religionists), it has never really been developed as a more complete theory of religion and religious behaviors, from finding messages in random events to seeing the face of Jesus on a plate of spaghetti. In the presence of continual uncertainty, anthropomorphism becomes a perceptual strategy whereby we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can to resolve it.
DATE:19990629
KEYWORDS:psychology religion skepticism
MISC:336p., illustrated
PUBLISHER:Oxford University Press
TITLE:Faces In The Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
