Moralizing gods were rare in ancestral foraging religions

Evidence

If we confine our sample to hunting and foraging groups, we find that Big Gods are indeed a rarity. Taking a conservative approach, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm analyzed 43 ethnographies covering 18 foraging societies. Specifically, Boehm narrowed his sample to groups that had spatial mobility, economic independence, egalitarianism, and large-game hunting. In this strictly defined subsample, he found that the gods and spirits occasionally intervene, but typically care little about human affairs that we would consider falling under the label moral. Despite substantial coverage of each society’s religion, few reveal supernatural sanctions for lying, stealing, disrespect to elders, adultery, fighting, or cheating. For example, only four of the eighteen societies have gods that prohibit cheating, and only seven prohibit murder, even though all societies disapprove of and socially sanction these behaviors. We must be careful in extrapolating from hunting and gathering societies of today to ancestral humans, but if these groups tell us anything, it is that ancestral religions did not have a clear moral dimension. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Core empirical pillar for the reader’s Big God analysis: moralizing deities are historically contingent, not universal — directly supports the contrast with the Jesuits’ morally probing God in the novel.
• QUESTION: The seven-of-eighteen-murder figure is striking — worth checking whether the foraging societies that DO have murder-prohibiting gods are the ones that later grew into larger, more complex polities.