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Cognitive Science Of New Religious Movements
Cognitive science of new religious movements is the study of new religious movements (NRMs) from the perspective of cognitive science. The field employs methods and theories from a variety of disciplines, including cognitive science of religion, sociology of religion, scientific study of religion, anthropology, and artificial life. Scholars in the field seek to explain the origin and evolution of new religious movements in terms of ordinary universal cognitive processes. History The field traces its roots to the beginnings of the field of cognitive science of religion in the 1990s, especially in Harvey Whitehouse's work on 'cargo cults' in Papua New Guinea and cognitivist work by sociologists of religion William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark. In a 2005 article titled "Towards a Cognitive Science of New Religious Movements", Afzal Upal conceptualized the field and proposed agent-based social simulation as a good complement for Whitehouse's anthropological approach to inve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Religious Movement
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion, is a religious or Spirituality, spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing Religious denomination, denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.Eileen Barker, 1999, "New Religious Movements: their incidence and significance", ''New Religious Movements: challenge and response'', Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell editors, Routledge There is no single, agreed-upon criterion for defining a "new religi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afzal Upal
Muhammad Afzal Upal is a writer and a cognitive scientist with contributions to cognitive science of religion, machine learning for planning, and agent-based social simulation. Early life and education He was born in Pakistan with 2 sisters and 3 brothers. His family emigrated to Canada because Ahmadiyya, the form of Islam they practiced, was discriminated against in Pakistan. For his PhD research, he worked under the supervision of Professor Renee Elio at the University of Alberta. In December 1999, he successfully defended his thesis on "Learning to Improve the Quality of Plans Produced by Partial-order Planners". Leadership He was chair of the First International Workshop on Cognition and Culture, the 14th Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational, Social, and Organizational Sciences, and the AAAI-06 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Agent-based Social Simulation. Professional career In July 1999, Upal was hired as a tenure-track assistant pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Religious Studies
Religious studies, also known as religiology or the study of religion, is the study of religion from a historical or scientific perspective. There is no consensus on what qualifies as ''religion'' and definition of religion, its definition is highly contested. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing empirical, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives. While theology attempts to understand the Transcendence (religion), transcendent or supernatural according to traditional religious accounts, religious studies takes a more scientific and objective approach, independent of any particular religious viewpoint. Religious studies thus draws upon multiple academic disciplines and methodologies including Anthropology of religion, anthropology, Sociology of religion, sociology, Psychology of religion, psychology, Philosophy of religion, philosophy, and history of religion. Religious studies originated in Modern Europe, 19th-century Europe, when B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Researchers Of New Religious Movements And Cults
Research is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error. These activities are characterized by accounting and controlling for biases. A research project may be an expansion of past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole. The primary purposes of basic research (as opposed to applied research) are documentation, discovery, interpretation, and the research and development (R&D) of methods and systems for the advancement of human knowledge. Approaches to research depend on epistemologies, which vary considerably both within and between humanities and sciences. There are several forms of research: scientific, humanities, artistic, economic, s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion. To understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, economics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.Thagard, PaulCognitive Science, ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neuron, neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Science Of Religion
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities. History Although religion has been the subject of serious scientific study since at least the late nineteenth century, the study of religion as a cognitive phenomenon is relatively recent. While it often relies upon earlier research within anthropology of religion and sociology of religion, cognitive science of religion considers the results of that work within the context of evolutionary and cognitive theories. As such, cognitive science of religion was only made possible by the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and the development, starting in the 1970s, of sociobiology and other approaches explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, especially evolutionary psychology. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academic Study Of New Religious Movements
The academic study of new religious movements is known as new religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by ex-members as well as the friends and relatives of members, organizations that collect information on NRMs, the mainstream media, and academics studying such phenomena. The study of new religions is unified by its topic of interest, rather than by its methodology, and is therefore interdisciplinary in nature. A sizeable body of scholarly literature on new religions has been published, most of it produced by social scientists. Among the disciplines that NRS uses are anthropology, history, psychology, religious studies, and sociology. Of these approaches, sociology played a particularly prominent role ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UCLouvain
UCLouvain (or Université catholique de Louvain , French for Catholic University of Louvain, officially in English the University of Louvain) is Belgium's largest French-speaking university and one of the oldest in Europe (originally established in 1425). It is located in Louvain-la-Neuve, which was expressly built to house the university, and has smaller campuses in Brussels, Charleroi, Mons, Belgium, Mons, Tournai and Namur. Since September 2018, the university uses the branding UCLouvain, replacing the acronym UCL, following a merger with Saint-Louis University, Brussels. The original Old University of Louvain, University of Louvain (''Universitas Lovaniensis'') was founded at the centre of the historic town of Leuven (or ''Louvain'') in 1425, making it the List of universities in Belgium, first university in Belgium and the Low Countries, and abolished by law in 1797. This university was the centre of Baianism, Jansenism and Febronianism in Europe. A new university, the Stat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Context-based Model Of Minimal Counterintuitiveness
The context-based model of the counterintuitiveness effect is a cognitive model of The Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect (or MCI-effect for short) i.e., the finding by many cognitive scientists of religion that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable for people than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts The context-based model emphasizes the role played by the context in which a concept appears in making it counterintuitive. This is in contrast to the traditional (also called ''content-based'') accounts of the MCI-effect which underscore the role played by context. Barrett & Nyhoff (2001) claim that this is necessary in order to explain cross-cultural success of religious concepts. Although research on schemas and scripts suggests the possibility that incongruent concepts may be better remembered thus contributing to their transmission, these conceptual structures are culturally variable to a large extent and will not provide an explanation for cross ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olav Hammer
Olav Hammer (born 1958) is a Swedish professor emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense working in the field of history of religion. Career Hammer has written four books in Swedish and one monograph, ''Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age'' (2001), and one co-authored book, ''Religious Innovation in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods'' (with Mikael Rothstein, 2023) in English. LIBRIS record foOlav Hammer/ref> The monograph, which was also Hammer's doctoral dissertation in 2000 at Lund University, investigates the rhetorical strategies of legitimization of a number of related new religious movements. Hammer is also editor of several books, including ''Polemical Encounters'' (with Kocku von Stuckrad, Brill 2007), ''The Invention of Sacred Tradition'' (with James R. Lewis, Cambridge UP 2007), ''Alternative Christs'' (Cambridge UP 2009), ''Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements'' (with Mikael Rothstein, Cambridge UP ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Society For Krishna Consciousness
The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as the Hare Krishna movement, is a religious organization that follows the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. It was founded on 13 July 1966 in New York City by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. The organization's spiritual and administrative headquarters is located in Mayapur, West Bengal, India, and it claims a global membership of around one million people. ISKCON teaches a form of panentheistic Hinduism rooted in the Bhagavad Gita, the ''Bhagavata Purana'', and other scriptures, interpreted through the commentaries of its founder. Although commonly regarded as monotheistic by the general public, ISKCON theology emphasizes that the Supreme Being, Krishna, manifests in multiple forms while remaining the singular, ultimate reality. The movement is described as the largest and most influential branch of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, which originated in India in the early 16th century an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rodney Stark
Rodney William Stark (July 8, 1934 – July 21, 2022) was an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, co-director of the university's Institute for Studies of Religion, and founding editor of the ''Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion''.Curriculum vitae Baylor University. Stark had written over 30 books, including '' The Rise of Christianity'' (1996), and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
