IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/wsi/wschap/9789811273148_0002.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Did Seismic Activity Lead to the Rise of Religions?

In: THE ECONOMICS OF RELIGION

Author

Listed:
  • Jeanet Sinding Bentzen
  • Eric R. Force

Abstract

We document a link between religiosity and natural disasters — earthquakes in particular. Using modern data from surveys, we first show that religiosity has increased in the aftermath of disasters such as earthquakes. As emotional effects can be analytically disentangled from those of physical destruction, we suggest that religious coping is the most potent link; people use their religion for comfort and explanation to match the other-worldly aspect of seismic destruction. Second, we show that the major religions of the modern world emerged in a remarkably tight band along seismically active plate-tectonic boundaries, suggesting the persistence of this link. Third, we show that the majority of known immediate cultural responses to historic earthquakes have been religious rather than secular. We conclude that religion tends to emerge as a response to the unanswerable questions posed by earthquakes, and other natural disasters, and as a provider of comfort to survivors. Earthquakes may thus have played a pivotal role for millennia in the emergence and persistence of religion.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeanet Sinding Bentzen & Eric R. Force, 2023. "Did Seismic Activity Lead to the Rise of Religions?," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Robert M Sauer (ed.), THE ECONOMICS OF RELIGION, chapter 2, pages 63-95, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
  • Handle: RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789811273148_0002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789811273148_0002
    Download Restriction: Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

    File URL: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811273148_0002
    Download Restriction: Ebook Access is available upon purchase.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yu, Weihua & Hu, Jingjing & Deng, Chenchen, 2024. "Overflowing waters, diluted investments: The enduring impact of historical Yellow River floods on enterprise fixed assets investments," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economics; Religion; Economics of Religion; Max Weber; Adam Smith;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Z12 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Religion
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
    • Z1 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics
    • D9 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics
    • E7 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macro-Based Behavioral Economics
    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • A1 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789811273148_0002. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscientific.com/page/worldscibooks .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.