ABSTRACT
In the first chapter, I claimed that attempts to explain religion are lacking. So it is time to listen to that relative of ours, and to inquire about his origins. In this chapter, I introduce core concepts to illustrate what I believe is a persuasive, informative, and rational explanation. We will encounter these concepts in later chapters as we attempt to account for the origins of religion. It is crucial, then, to understand Jaynes’s contributions. This introduction of Jaynes’s thinking is intended to place human spirituality within the context of evolutionary psychology. I illustrate how changes in the early history of religion make sense when Jaynes’s views on neuroculture are applied. This lays the foundation for later treatments about how civilizations transitioned from god-governed bicameral theocentric societies to relatively secularized polities peopled by subjective beings possessed of selves.
