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| How Can We Measure Religious Behavior? |
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| Living - Society | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Wednesday, 10 September 2008 17:30 | |||
 Columbia, MO, USA. While religious belief is very important to most people, there are many who are skeptics, outright unbelievers, or disaffected with religious practice. Science has nothing to say about religious doctrine, of course, but social scientists are interested in the behavior of religous people, hoping for clues to their impact in society.
Anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion without a way to measure religious beliefs. The use of quantitative measures would be important, since they avoid speculation about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified.
The Supernatural and Natural Selection: The
 Evolution of Religion. Lyle B. Steadman and Craig T. Palmer. Paradigm Publishers: Boulder, CO. (2008) ISBN: 1594515654; ISBN-13: 9781594515651. "Instead of studying religion by trying to measure unidentifiable beliefs in the supernatural, we looked at identifiable and observable behavior — the behavior of people communicating acceptance of supernatural claims," said Craig T. Palmer, associate professor of anthropology in the University of Missouri (MU) College of Arts and Science.
 Lyle B. Steadman, Professor of human evolution and social change, Arizona State University (ASU).
Palmer says "We noticed that communicating acceptance of a supernatural claim tends to promote cooperative social relationships. This communication demonstrates a willingness to accept, without skepticism, the influence of the speaker in a way similar to a child's acceptance of the influence of a parent."
Palmer and Lyle B. Steadman, emeritus professor of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University (ASU), explored the supernatural claims in different forms of religion, including
They found that the clearest identifiable effect of religious behavior is the promotion of cooperative family-like social relationships, which include parent/child-like relationships between the individuals making and accepting the supernatural claims and sibling-like relationships among co-acceptors of those claims.
 Totemism is the claim of kinship between people and a species or other object that serves as the emblem of a common ancestor. Depicted: Totem Pole in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia
"Almost every religion in the world, including all tribal religions, use family kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister and child for fellow members," Steadman said. "They do this to encourage the kind of behavior found normally in families — where the most intense social relationships occur."
"Once people realize that observing the behavior of people communicating acceptance of supernatural claims is how we actually identify religious behavior and religion, we can then propose explanations and hypotheses to account for why people have engaged in religious behavior in all known cultures."
 The TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.
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