Reseña del libro "La Especie Espiritual"
Cierta clase de intelectuales lleva prediciendo la desaparición de la religión y el fin de la fe desde al menos el siglo XVIII. Si las últimas predicciones en este sentido fueran correctas, serían las primeras en serlo. La gran mayoría de la población mundial es religiosa y tiene más hijos que los no creyentes. Hay evidencias de que las personas religiosas son más felices, más altruistas y cooperativas (al menos con sus correligionarios) y más saludables que las que carecen de fe. Melvin Konner, brillante antropólogo, examina la naturaleza de la religiosidad y cómo ésta da forma y beneficia a la humanidad. /// Believers is a scientists answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the Four HorsemenRichard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchensknown for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species. Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance-dance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends and explorations in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. Faith has always manifested itself in different wayssome revelatory and comforting; some kind and good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive, and violent. But the future, Konner argues, will both produce more nonbelievers, and incline the religious among usholding their own by having larger familiesto increasingly reject prejudice and aggression. A colorful weave of personal stories of religiousand irreligiousencounters, as well as new scientific research, Believers shows us that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away.
