Chris Mooney flags a new study that suggests “there is a kind of geography of human religiosity – one in which beliefs map onto the climates and ecology of different regions”:
[I]t’s one thing to postulate that religion is a way to bind us together in threatening environments – and quite another to demonstrate it. To do so, [researcher Carlos] Botero and his colleagues turned to a classic anthropological source, the Ethnographic Atlas, a compilation of research on a large variety of traditional societies across the world compiled in the earlier part of the 20th century. The study examined the religious beliefs recorded for 583 of these societies, and correlated these beliefs with a host of ecological factors specific to the regions in which the groups live or lived, with a particular emphasis on environmental factors affecting climatic stability (the regularity of rainfall, for instance, or predictable temperatures) and the availability of resources (such as the abundance of plants, amphibians, and mammals).
Sure enough, they authors found that cultures who believed in a moralizing god or gods – supreme beings who were believed to be involved in the fate of humans and who offered moral prescriptions on how to behave – tended to be located in environments that were harsher to deal with and less climatically stable. “The bottom line is that we find both resource scarcity and the propensity to be exposed to ecological duress tends to be associated with these beliefs,” says Botero – presumably because in harsh environments, groups need to cohere and cooperate, and a shared belief in a moralizing god helps them to do that.
The Dish 