Big Gods Came After The Rise of Civilizations, Not Before, Finds Study Using Huge Historical Database
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When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behaviour. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.
Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralising religions came into being.
Now, thanks to our massive new database of world history, known as Seshat (named after the Egyptian goddess of record keeping), we’re starting to get some answers.
Eye | Vogue Explains Meerkat | East Austin, Texas Under the Lens | Rick Perry Called By God To Serve
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Meerkat Obsessed
What Is Meerkat and Why Is Everyone Obsessed With It? Vogue.com
If you weren’t in Austin last weekend for SXSW, Vogue writes Meerkat is a new app that allows users to easily livestream video from their cellphones onto their Twitter accounts.
Another sign of the imminent rise of Meerkat is that Twitter decided to remove Meerkat from its social graph. So while Meerkat users can still broadcast live videos on their Twitter feeds, a user’s followers will no longer get a notification when a new live stream begins, making it harder to know when to tune in. This move came shortly after Twitter purchased a similar app, Periscope. But the social graph ban only increased Meerkat’s draw—who wouldn’t want to root for the little app that could?
Austin’s Friends & Neighbor’s Jill Bradshaw
The Fashion Insider’s Guide to Austin Vogue.com
In town for SXSW, Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson tracked down hot spots in Austin, starting out with Jill Bradshaw’s Friends & Neighbors. ‘I wanted to see more of the sky,’says Bradshaw, who returned to her college town from Nolita in Manhattan. In New York, the teepee lover ran I Heart, a fashion boutique for emerging labels. Friends & Neighbors, mixes vintage clothing, housewares, music, and food in her signature colorful way.
Her partners in Friends & Neighbors—located in a house in East Austin —are Greg Mathews and Jade Place Mathews, who run local eatery Hillside Farmacy, as well as Brooklyn’s El Diablo Tacos at Union Pool. Check out more Austin hot spots.
Cruel Joke in Austin
Austin mayor Steve Adler called this week’s placement of professionally-printed ‘whites-only’ stickers on six businesses on the city’s East Side (home to Vogue.com highlights above) ‘an appalling and offensive display of ignorance in our city … Our city is a place where respect for all people is a part of our spirit and soul. We will keep it that way.’
State Rep. Dawnna Dukes (D-Austin) spoke loud and clear on the incident:
‘Some jokes just are not funny. If this is a joke at all, it is tasteless,’ Dukes wrote. ‘Pardon mon française mais, I will be damned if this will occur in my House District, district 46 on my watch on 12th St. in this historical Black Community or any community.’
Dukes, wrote on her Facebook page:
