The Making of Religion

"The Making of Religion" by Andrew Lang is an intellectual journey into the roots of religious faith, created in the late 1800s. This book takes a close look at what anthropologists thought about where belief in spirits came from, and how people started to believe in a single, all-powerful God. Lang questions some of the old ideas, using new discoveries in psychology and anthropology. He looks at many different points of view from other scholars, arguing that to really understand how religion began, we need to use both anthropology and psychology. Lang starts off by explaining why he wanted to explore the history of religion. He talks about the usual idea that beliefs in spirits came from things like dreams, shadows, and death, and that this slowly changed into the idea of one God. But Lang disagrees, saying we need to look at other things, like visions and hallucinations, as possible reasons for religious belief. He thinks that by studying the beliefs of uncivilized cultures and comparing them to what we know about the human mind today, we can learn a lot about what makes people spiritual and how religious ideas grew over time. Lang also talks about how anthropology and psychology are often studied separately, and that we need to bring them together to answer these big questions about religion.