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Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief Paperback – Illustrated, December 2, 2008
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Winner of the 2008 Christianity Today Award of Merit in Theology/Ethics
The History of God
In Discovering God, award-winning sociologist Rodney Stark presents a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone Age to the Modern Age and wrestles with the central questions of religion and belief.
- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperOne
- Publication dateDecember 2, 2008
- Dimensions6 x 1.24 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100061626015
- ISBN-13978-0061626012
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Stark’s retelling of the origins of the world’s great religions is fascinating and excellent. — Newsweek
“[A] wide-ranging investigation...serious students of religion will recognize this as an essential sourcebook.” — Booklist
About the Author
Rodney Stark is the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. His thirty books on the history and sociology of religion include The Rise of Christianity, Cities of God, For the Glory of God, Discovering God, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Stark received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Discovering God
The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of BeliefBy Rodney StarkHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Rodney StarkAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061626012
Chapter One
Gods in Primitive Societies
Much has been said about the religious life of primitive1 humans, despite the fact that very little is known about it with any certainty. We do know that for thousands of years, some human burials have included grave goods, which may be taken as evidence that our distant ancestors believed in life after death. Deep inside caves we also have found structures that might have been altars, and some caves contained collections of such things as bear skulls that might have had religious significance, too. In early Neolithic (New Stone Age) sites such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey,2 there is some evidence that bulls may have been sacred, and here and there archaeologists have found small figurines that might have represented a very ample mother goddess, or not.3 Beyond that, all is conjecture.4
These conjectures take two forms. The more reasonable of these is based on the assumption that recent observations of surviving primitive cultures can be taken as representative of those long gone. But is that true? If these cultures are not significantly different from those of early times, why did they not keep up? A common answer has been that most human progress is the result of diffusion, not independent innovation, and these particular groups failed to keep up because they were too isolated to benefit from the spread of innovations that carried other cultures forward. On these grounds it is claimed that surviving primitive cultures present a reliable image of the past. Although I am among those who regard this as a somewhat "unsound" assumption,5 I agree that the ethnographic accounts of the religions of these groups deserve careful analysis.
The second conjecture proposes that not too long ago humans lacked sufficient intelligence and consciousness to entertain such things as religious notions, having very little mental life of any kind. Granted that if we accept as human those creatures lacking not only stone tools, but even language, the assertion probably is justified. But many scholars have made this claim about the humans who lived during Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) times and from this have assumed that the earliest religions were extremely infantile. Surprisingly, the primary basis for claiming that Stone Age humans were dim brutes is not comparative physiology based on skulls and brain capacity, these being much less diagnostic of intelligence than might be supposed. Instead, the biology is inferred from culture—from the fact that during the Paleolithic period, "technological progress was extraordinarily slow,"6 ergo people in those days were of low intelligence and their religions, if they had any, must have been very rudimentary.
These biological inferences are very doubtful because the technological gap between modern cultures and those of surviving "primitive" cultures is about as great as between modern cultures and those of the Neanderthals, despite the fact that the biological differences at issue no longer exist—today all humans are Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, the notion that even "modern" primitives are biologically inferior was an article of faith among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, and variations on that theme persist in some current attempts by biologists and evolutionary psychologists to predict the end of religion, claiming that faith is incompatible with the greater mental capacity of modern humans.
The first portion of this chapter examines efforts by early social scientists to use ethnographies of recent primitives to characterize and classify primitive religions of long ago. While their reconstructions differed substantially, there was consensus on two points: religion is a universal feature of human cultures, albeit primitive religions were very crude. Consequently, the chapter summarizes, compares, and evaluates three major kinds of explanations offered as to why religion is universal: biological, cultural, and theological. Next, the characterization of early religions as crude and infantile will be reconsidered in light of an abundance of later ethnographic evidence showing that many of these religions were far more sophisticated than had been supposed. Both the social-scientific and the theological implications of this discovery are considered.
Reconstructing Primitive Religions
With the advent of the Age of Exploration, many Europeans began to return with reports of the exotic religious beliefs and practices of "backward" people around the world. Some of these were pure fantasy. Some were extremely biased. Some were very unreliable, having been written by a person who could not speak the local language and who devoted little time to the study. But many were remarkably accurate, and a few were magnificent works of scholarship, such as the detailed, sixteenth-century study of Aztec religion based on careful interviews with actual priests and observations of many rites by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino Ribeira de Sahagún (c. 1500?1590), which, sad to say, lay unnoticed in a Spanish library until 1830.7
As these reports piled up, some European scholars tried to use them to learn what primitive religions were actually like. Others simply mined them for examples that supported their preconceptions, and a few paid very little attention to this literature, preferring to not let facts inhibit their theorizing about primitive religions. The major pioneering efforts to reconstruct the religions of primitives fall into four approaches or "schools" of thought: Naturism, Animism, Ghost Theory, and Totemism. Although each of these approaches has many shortcomings, they serve as an effective way to begin an exploration of primitive religion and are especially useful to set the stage for a remarkable later breakthrough.
Naturism
Max Müller (1823?1900) popularized the comparative study of religions, in part by editing good English translations of Eastern scriptures. Müller was only marginally interested in primitive religions, but he proposed that all religions, primitive or otherwise, arise because from earliest times humans have always been awed by the grandeur of nature. Naturism proposes that religions have their origins in the personification of natural forces and objects and the "myths" that arise from these personifications. Hence, Müller is considered the leader of the Naturism "school."
Although most Naturists were Germans, Müller spent most of his adult life at Oxford, rising to be a Professor and Fellow of All Souls. He was perhaps "the first ?celebrity' academician,"8 who lectured far and wide and gave many newspaper interviews—today he would be a regular on the talk shows. Much of his public prominence came from his editorship of a massive project known as The Sacred Books of the East, a set of fifty volumes that appeared between 1879 and 1910, most of which are still in print. The first volume in this series was Müller's own translation of the Upanis¸ads.
Continues...
Excerpted from Discovering Godby Rodney Stark Copyright © 2008 by Rodney Stark. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : HarperOne; Reprint edition (December 2, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061626015
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061626012
- Item Weight : 1.14 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.24 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,649,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,372 in Sociology & Religion
- #7,299 in History of Christianity (Books)
- #9,144 in Christian Church History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Rodney Stark is one of the leading authorities on the sociology of religion. He grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, where he began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the US Army, Stark received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. For many years, the Pulitzer Prize nominee was professor of sociology and professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he became Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.
Stark has authored more than 150 scholarly articles and 32 books in 17 different languages, including several widely used sociology textbooks and best-selling titles like The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries; The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious Than Ever; The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion; God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades; A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity ion China; and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.
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Rodney Stark has been one of America's leading sociologists of religion for a long time. (Cited by skeptics as well as religious believers.) His marketplace model of religions, which he has been developing for decades (it goes back at least to his Theory of Religion) is a powerful tool of understanding: it may revolutionize the way you see the world, as it did for me. In Theory of Religion, and then his series on the rise of Christianity, Stark developed and tested a series of general postulates about the social nature of religion, seldom however writing too boldly about its ontological basis.
This book pulls many of the threads of Stark's storied career together,introduces interesting new topics -- especially "temple religion," and a thoughtful take on Lang's "High Gods" -- and poses a few questions about the truth or falsehood of religion as well.
Over the past 24 years, I have researched many of the topics Stark covers in this book. What impresses me about this book is that Stark so often gets it right where the "conventional wisdom" gets it wrong. I begin with specific claims, then will comment on Stark's story of religion:
"Where religious monopolies prevail. the overall level of public religious involvement will be low."
"Why did none of these three 'major' religions, nor even all of them together, actually become the religion of most Chinese?" (As a China scholar, and author of True Son of Heaven, I see that as a great question -- though by my count, China has traditionally had some eight "major" religions.)
"This ethnic barriar to conversion probably was the sole reason that the Roman Empire did not embrace the God of Abraham."
"Intellectuals always form factions and have such fallings out."
"(Gnostic) Scriptures were properly dismissed as a last-gasp effort to incorporate Christianity within traditional polytheism." (I wrote a book on this subject last year, reaching the same rather rare conclusion.)
"The long decline of European Christianity, beginning with Constantine's establishment of it as the subsidized state church." (Stark has written brilliantly, and with great explanatory power, on this over the years.)
"The notion that sometimes a story might really be about candles or even about a hole in the clouds is disdained." (Often an iconoclast, Stark takes Freud to the woodshed here, especially his ridiculous theories of the origin of religion.)
"People will more readily join an exclusive religion to the degree that it minimizes their loss of religious capital." (An interesting take on some ideas that have been kicking around among Christians since Paul's speech on Mars Hill -- I call it "fulfillment theology," and have done quite a bit of research and writing on it, but found Stark's "market" formulation of the idea fascinating.)
But this short collection of sociological aphorisms does little to express the wealth contained in this book. What Stark attempts is nothing less than a religious story of mankind, from the Stone Age to the present. He renders Stone Age tribes more respect than static but powerful agrarian empires like Egypt and Sumer and the Aztecs. Stark describes the rise of modern, reformist religions in the Axial Age, and tries (with less than complete success, IMO -- I don't think Confucius and the Brahmans had much in common, or that one borrowed from the other) to explain this sudden outburst of religious creativity. His history of the great religions is frequently surprising, even to thosase who have heard the story many times before -- and he often adds something fundamental.
Some readers below criticize Stark for engaging in "apologetics." (Or even for his brief mention of ID.) This is specious; he only argues for Christianity as the highest understanding of God at the very end of the book, and then only modestly, and admitting others will differ. Christians are likely to find some of his ideas quite challenging. Any open-minded skeptic, who isn't allergy to contrary views, should be able to recoup the price of the book ten times before that point. And the deadliest thing Stark does to Islam is not to criticize it -- he does little of that, actually -- but to describe in detail the treacherous career of its founder.
In some ways, Stark reverts to older, 19th Century theories of religion here -- the closest parallel I can think of (very imperfect) is J. N. Farquhar. I don't agree with all of Stark's claims -- aside from sometimes unconvincing speculation about the "Axial Age," I think Stark identifies the European mission enterprise too closely with colonialism, underestimates the strength of Christianity in Europe during the age of Wesley and Wilberforce, and is wrong to identify the ancient Chinese Shang Di as "the eldest ancestor" (see the Cambridge History of China, Shang dynasty volume). But it is fascinating to watch the continuing development of Stark's thought. I learned as much from this book as from any I have read in years.
author, Jesus and the Religions of Man
Dr. Stark covers the development of religion starting with pre-history, and takes a look at all major religious movements. It is a good, although brief, overview of religions. As usual, Dr. Stark writes using in a very understandable manner, his work is well researched. His decades of research and experience as a sociologist of religion comes through in the depth of thought which is apparent in his writings.
What I especially enjoyed was Stark's "objectivity" (if you can call it that) of applying a business model to the subject of religion and exploring the question, "Why did religion X thrive and religion Y wane?" Stark emphasizes the dynamic and paradoxical nature of human belief -- the logical tenants of monotheism conflicts with emotional needs for love/security/etc. and hence the appeal of polytheism and ascribing human characteristics to the cold, distant monotheist god. Stark asserts people join faiths not strictly for theological reasons but especially for social and economic reasons. While I don't agree with everything he writes, I think his basic ideas make a lot of sense.
Stark reviews the historical origins and basic beliefs of all the major religions, which he discusses respectfully. I enjoyed learning more about Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam. His discussion of early Christianity was interesting too. Stark claims to be agnostic but I wonder -- he seemed to favor Christianity/Judaism by concluding it was the only major faith-based culture that could have led to modern science because the theology of Creation implies man can ultimately understand God's handiwork.
Much of the book is a swift-moving and thoroughly interesting history of worldwide religious development. Relevant sociological ideas, data, anecdotes, previous scholarship and scathing criticism of many academic truisms are sprinkled throughout, with the most controversial elements--Stark's opinions on what may count as authentic, revealed religion--coming in the final chapter.
Perhaps my greatest "discovery" in the book was his observation (just one of very many well-argued points) that religious plurality in a society actually increases overall religious participation and intensity. In other words, people are more engaged religiously when there are lots of options in the religious marketplace. State-sponsored religions needn't focus on outreach or the needs of the masses; they already have a monopoly. But when churches or other religious groups have to support themselves, only zealous, effective groups will attract enough faithful to survive. This leads to a society (such as the modern United States) filled with many successful denominations that together keep the population engaged--and each other hard at work.
Whether or not one agrees with Stark's conclusions (which many other reviewers have focused on, so I won't reiterate here), "Discovering God" is both fun and fascinating. His writing reminds me of sitting in on a provocative university lecture, the kind where the professor's convictions and the truth are passionately presented as one, and where you are enthralled even as you disagree.