OPEN AND CLOSED BEHAVIOR PROGRAMS IN THE TRANSMISSION OF RELIGION

In the cognitive science of religion, the challenge confronting us is to show that significant features of the content, organization, and spread of religious phenomena can be explained in terms of the ways in which panhuman, evolved psychological mechanisms are activated. This is not a simple task, however. We all know that one cannot explain variables in terms of con-stants, so how can theories about a universal mind help to explain variable religious outputs? Part of the answer is that religion is not as variable as all that: much of what we have learned from ethnography, historiography, and archaeology (for instance) points to a massive amount of cross-cultural re-currence not only in the forms that religious systems take but even in rela-tion to some aspects of doctrinal content. Another part of the answer is that universal cognitive mechanisms can be activated in different ways, with pre-dictably variable consequences for the way religions are organized and their concepts are formed and transmitted