Agricultural societies favor doctrinal rituals and moralistic Big Gods

Evidence

Although both types of rituals can co-occur in a group, chances are that if one type is more prevalent, the other is less common. Doctrinal rituals are the stuff of organized religion. They are associated with greater reliance on agriculture, which in turn demands greater levels of ingroup cooperation. These agricultural societies are the ones that were historically shaped by prosocial religious groups. In contrast, rare but emotionally arousing imagistic rituals tended to occur in smaller-scale groups that are less likely to depend on agriculture, and much less likely to be associated with moralistic Big Gods. It’s not that the imagistic mode is absent from organized religion. It does occur and can galvanize and renew faith and commitment. However, the imagistic mode is less predictable, and as a result, when it occurs in prosocial religions, it is actively managed by religious authorities and tolerated only to the extent that it doesn’t challenge the central dogma or the group’s interests. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 427

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the fumi-e trampling is a doctrinal-authority move containing an imagistic shock — Japanese authorities weaponize the doctrinal test format while exploiting its imagistic emotional force to sever commitment.
• XREF: The ‘imagistic mode actively managed by authorities’ directly parallels how Big God prosocial religions domesticate ecstatic tradition — echoes the reader’s frame of religious authority controlling the terms of visible faith. — connects to: Religious worship may have driven the agricultural revolution rather than resulting from it.; Big God belief enabled group cooperation that agriculture alone could not achieve.; Foraging societies’ gods rarely enforce moral rules that humans themselves uphold — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 815 (+10 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 427

Broader Connections

• Supernatural watchers and rituals jointly forged large-scale moral communities #corroborates (0.85)
• Group expansion drives religion toward moral, demanding, interventionist gods #corroborates (0.80)
• The social scale a religion can bind grows with the deity’s remoteness #expands (0.80)
• Group size predicts Big Gods independent of stratification and missionary contact #qualifies (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 418