Foraging peoples’ deities lack power, knowledge, and moral concern

Evidence

There is little dispute anymore that all hunter-gatherer groups have their spirits and gods who transcend physical, biological, and psychological limitations, at least to some extent. But these deities are not that powerful, have limited knowledge, and are largely indifferent toward human affairs. Hadza foragers have a creator God, called Haine, who nevertheless cares little about human morality. Similar observations have come from ethnographies of other foraging groups. Among the San in the Kalahari, for example, “Man’s wrong-doing against man is not left to Gao!na’s [the local god] punishment nor is it considered to be his concern. Man corrects or avenges such wrong-doings himself in his social context.” Pascal Boyer also reports many cases where the gods of small-scale societies may be tricked by humans or be manipulated by other rival gods. If they have powers and care, they typically care about themselves (they want sacrifices), not about the common good. These are hardly the all-knowing, all-powerful, judgmental, moralizing Big Gods of the modern world religions. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the counterfactual: Rodrigues’ Big God gaze in Silence is historically late and culturally specific, not an innate human universal — directly relevant to the reader’s Norenzayan-Baumard integration.
• DEFINE: Establishes the baseline (small gods) against which Big Gods are defined — central to the reader’s typology.