The reasons we do and believe things are not the reasons most people would proffer.
For example, you will often see Jews attempt to argue that kashrut (kosher, in Yiddish) dietary rules make sense in arid environments where trichinosis was rife[1], and so on, but what is the reason why you can’t mix fabrics, or get tattoos? The reason appears to be that these marked the Jews out from their competing cultures. An approach taken by recent Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) scholars adopts the “costly signalling hypothesis” formulated in evolutionary biology by Amotz Zahavi and applies it to the cultural evolution of these kinds of displays.
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Why do believers believe THOSE silly things?
If, as I argued in the last post, believers believe silly things in order to make the community cohere in the face of competing loyalties of the wider community, why is it that they believe the thi…
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