#180 Joseph Bulbulia: Religion, Cognition, Ritual, Morality, And Meaning

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Dr. Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland, where he was appointed the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in Theological and Religious Studies in 2018. Dr. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Dr. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a 20-year longitudinal study tracking over 15,000 New Zealanders each year. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016, Dr. Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.

In this episode, we talk about the cognitive science of religion. First, we discuss how religion is a multifaceted phenomenon, its evolutionary bases, and the complicated causal relationship between beliefs and actions. Then, we talk about religions rituals, what they are about, and the effects they have on people, particularly the high-arousal ones. We also refer to costly signaling in the context of religion, and its relationship to trust, and how socioeconomic factors and natural disasters influence adherence to religion. Finally, we talk about some philosophical aspects of religion, like the one related to meaning, and how by studying religion we can get insights into other social domains of human life.

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Follow Dr. Bulbulia’s work:

Faculty page: https://bit.ly/2uJbwp6

Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions: https://bit.ly/2TW3lAk

Articles on Researchgate: https://bit.ly/2VtD9xY

The Database of Religious History: https://bit.ly/2WFDiPl

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