Religion in Human Evolution Quotes

“Despotic tendencies in human beings are so deeply ingrained that they cannot simply be renounced. We did not just suddenly go from nasty to nice. Reverse dominance hierarchy is a form of dominance; egalitarianism is not simply the absence of despotism; it is the active and continuous elimination of potential despotism.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“William Butler Yeats wrote, six days before his death: "I know for certain that my time will not be long ... I am happy and I think full of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say `Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution

“Science is an extremely valuable avenue to truth. It is not the only one. To claim it is the only one is what is legitimately called -scientism- and takes its place among the many fundamentalisms of this world.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Not just words, but poetic meters could be personalized, viewed as divine, and were active in the world. In an entirely oral culture, the spoken word had consequences: one could indeed ‘do things with words’.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“The descriptions of tribal rituals themselves usually exhibit features that we could characterize as play; such ritual is very much embodied as in singing, dancing, feasting, and general hilarity, but there is also a powerful element of pretend play that can have serious meanings.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“We live in a world where the struggle for existence still dominates and is not about to transform itself completely into a relaxed field.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Narrative, in short. is more than literature, it is the way we understand our lives. If literature merely supplied entertainment, then it wouldn't be as important as it is. Great literature speaks to the deepest level of our humanity; it helps us better understand who we are. Narrative is not only the way we understand our personal and collective identities, it is the source of our ethics, our politics, and our religion. It is, as William James and Jerome Bruner assert, one of our two basic ways of thinking. Narrative isn't irrational -it can be criticized by rational argument- but it can't be derived from reason alone. Mythic (narrative) culture is not a subset of theoretic culture, nor will it ever be. It is older than theoretic culture and remains to this day an indispensable way of relating to the world.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Though normally the handshake simply confirmed the trustworthiness of an agreement, with perhaps an aura of divine protection, Attic grave reliefs suggest a further extension of the idea for they "show handshaking as a symbol of Faith at the parting between the dead and the living. Thus, handshaking was not only a sign of agreement among the living, but the gesture of trust and faith in the supreme departure." With us the handshake is hardly a conscious gesture, but nonetheless one does not expect to be attacked by someone with whom one has just shaken hands. A refusal of a proffered handshake, however, would make the ritual gesture conscious indeed: breaking the ritual raises ominous questions that would require an explanation.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice -even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic ‘mortgage’, as Voegelin called it, reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial ‘breakthrough’. Kings who ruled ‘by divine right’, are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a ‘higher power’. At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power. But one thing is certain: the issue never goes away.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“The myths are an effort to understand the nature of reality. Their narrators must use the analogies that lie at hand, analogies from their own social experience, with all its inner tensions and inconsistencies.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“If the disposition to dominate and the disposition to nurture are part of our biological heritage, they have been partially transformed by culture.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“We may not like to think of it when we say -it is more blessed to give than to receive-, but it is the giving that creates dominance. As Marcel Mauss reminds us: - To give is to show one’s superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister. – The archetypal minister is the child, who cannot repay what he or she receives, at least not until much later if ever. Thus, if nurturance is linked to dominance, receiving is linked to submission. These elementary facts of human life must surely be kept in mind as we consider the relation between gods and men, rulers and people, in hierarchical societies.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“In an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Science is an extremely valuable avenue to truth. It is not the only one. To claim it is the only oneis what is legitimately called -scientism- and takes its place among the many fundametalisms of this world.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“We did not come from nowhere. We are embedded in a very deep biological and cosmological history. That history does not determine us, because organisms from the very beginning, and increasingly with each new capacity, have influenced their own fate.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Dominance hierarchy is probably as old as mammal societies. Among behaviorally complex mammals, certainly among chimpanzees, patterns recognizably like ethics and politics have appeared, how long ago we don't know, but probably millions of years ago. And mammalian play, the seedbed of later capacities, goes back probably at least as far.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“If traditional myths of origin raise more questions than they answer, we should not be surprised that a scientific myth of origin should do the same. Science is nothing if not the continuous asking of new questions.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“When logic and observation are methodically combined, they render knowledge, episteme as the Greek philosophers put it, as opposed to doxa, opinion. Knowledge is based on demonstration; narrative does not demonstrate; rhetoric can persuade but not demonstrate. The world of daily life normally is constituted much more by opinion, by narrative, and rhetoric, than by demonstration. Indeed, the world of strict demonstration, of science (the Greek episteme can also be translated as "science"), is as much an alternate reality relative to the world of daily life as is music or religion.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“If personal identity resides in the telling, then so does social identity. Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology) know who they are by the stories they tell. The modern discipline of history is closely related to the emergence of the nation-state.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“The more complex, the more fragile. Complexity goes against the second law of thermodynamics, that all complex entities tend to fall apart, and it takes more and more energy for complex systems to function.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our adaptation.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“Technological advance at high speed combined with moral blindness about what we are doing to the world's societies and to the biosphere is a recipe for rapid extinction.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“religion is a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.18”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution

“Unless we pass through all the moments of the spirit's history in our present, we will not know who we are, will not be conscious of subjective spirit-that is, of our present cultural possibilities.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution