Blogs produce an interesting dialogue between what you consider complete and what you consider revisable. I did not like the title “Thinking Religion:” it sounded stilted and pretentious. Yesterday, while reading David Hume’s Natural History of Religion, I was struck by a quote and pulled it out for the title: Faces in the Moon, Armies in the Clouds (see the “credits” page for a citation).

In the passage I take the title from, Hume mentions the two images in order argue for a naturalistic Animism as the baseline of human religion. He never used the word Animism, mind you; the 19th century anthropologist and Quaker Edward B. Tylor coined and popularized the term.

I pull from this quote somewhat ironically. I see this anthropomorphizing tendency in the human mind as more of an asset. Hume identifies it with error. What Hume adheres to is a strong distinction between simple narrative identification and abstraction. I also do not buy it as a theory of the origin of religion, despite it popularity.