Referring to the article by Poor Richard that ends with a video of Dawkins, this quote expresses quite well my misgivings about these type of 'fundamentalist-secularist' approaches, when they have to deal with different cultures and approaches: Chris Knight: "Evolutionary psychologists, while presenting themselves as cautious scholars on their home ground, respond by parodying politically backward stereotypes when on the rampage outside their specialist domains. This is true not only of the self-professed racists and reactionaries. Not even Darwinism’s liberals can resist the knockabout fun and games. Take, for example, Pinker (p. 305) on ‘shamanism’ – a topic properly considered within social anthropology. Ignoring the vast scholarly literature on this fascinating theme, he explains the phenomenon as follows: ‘Tribal shamans are flim-flam artists who supplement their considerable practical knowledge with stage magic, drug-induced trances, and other cheap tricks’. The belief systems of preliterate peoples – their view, for example, that certain anthropomorphized principles are ‘sacred’ – are demoted to the status of hoaxes. Where constructs diverge from ‘the real world’, they must be quackery. On this issue as most others, Pinker is joined by Dawkins (1993), for whom religion of any kind is a computer bug – a cultural virus malevolently introduced to parasitize gullible minds. To social anthropology as a profession – I need hardly stress – such doctrinaire verdicts on the subject of * other peoples’ beliefs * are interesting only as an example of western folk-prejudice, not scholarship or science." (http://p2pfoundation.net/Culture_in_Mind) -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens