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Why We Need Religion - An Agnostic Celebration of Spiritual Emotions (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R593
Discovery Miles 5 930
You Save: R136
(19%)
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Why We Need Religion - An Agnostic Celebration of Spiritual Emotions (Hardcover)
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List price R729
Loot Price R593
Discovery Miles 5 930
You Save R136 (19%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This
claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive,
serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book
is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and
philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art,
religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that
science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of
wonder and the sublime -we can feel the sacred depths of nature-
but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that
are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional
stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors
who that praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma
argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic
power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance
of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic
research has only recently delivered concrete data on the
neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems.
This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful
territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates
new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of
religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages
those systems-rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it
argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing
this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of
religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.
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