RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Just finished reading Stark's "Discovering God". Pretty boring title for what turns out to be an excellent sociological work on comparative religions.

Starks couragiously claims that rational thinking allows to distinguish between inspired and non-inspired religions, that all religions descend from early High-God conceptions before having been watered down into temple cults, and that by today we have a better understanding of God than ever before. He builds strongly on the notion of the "Axial Age", i.e. the remarkable parallelism of religious innovations during the 6th cy. BC.

What impressed me most, however, was how consistently he traced characteristics of social movements across times, contexts and religions:

• There is no mass conversion. Conversi0n processes in growing religious movements are standard diffusion processes along social networks and identical to the S-curve we know from the take up of technological innovations: It took about 300 years for Christianity to fill the Roman Empire as it took about 250 years for Islam to fill Persia and North Africa.
• When given a "free market", religions compete for adherents: a process that stimulates religious innovation. In stifled religious monopolies individual spirituality will turn to the cheapest solution (read: magic) and decrease in general.
• A well documented church-to-sect cycle sufficiently explains the inevitable fragmentation of any monotheistic religion.
• Religiosity is not irrational, but based on rational choice following perceived personal benefits - which again has all to do with social networks.

My next Stark book is already on the table, ready to provide more building blocks for my increasingly sociological perspective on life.

Comments

[Marlin]

Hey Andi,
interesting to see your thoughts. I just finished "Acts of faith" last night and found it very good. I started off with Rise of Christianity, then went to Discovering God and Churching of America. I relly like Churching and Acts. I am very interested what comes out of it beyond the nice observations he makes.

Here are my posts on this: http://siyach.wordpress.com/tag/rodney-stark/