The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as the great multitude of books upon it, published in late years, tends to show. Indeed the great difficulty today in dealing with the subject, lies in the very mass of the material to hand-and that not only on account of the labor involved in sorting the material, but because the abundance itself of facts opens up temptation to a student in this department of Anthropology (as happens also in other branches of general Science) to rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts, statistics, and so forth, there are available in any investigation, the easier it is to pick out a considerable number which will fit a given theory. Carpenter's Pagan and Christian Creeds offers a comprehensive and thorough divergence from the mass material on the subject of the origins and correlations between the two. Cover photography by Paul Spremulli.
The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as the great multitude of books upon it, published in late years, tends to show. Indeed the great difficulty today in dealing with the subject, lies in the very mass of the material to hand-and that not only on account of the labor involved in sorting the material, but because the abundance itself of facts opens up temptation to a student in this department of Anthropology (as happens also in other branches of general Science) to rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts, statistics, and so forth, there are available in any investigation, the easier it is to pick out a considerable number which will fit a given theory. Carpenter's Pagan and Christian Creeds offers a comprehensive and thorough divergence from the mass material on the subject of the origins and correlations between the two. Cover photography by Paul Spremulli.
