Affluence, not political complexity, explains the rise of moralizing world religions

The ascetic and moralizing movements that spawned the world's major religious traditions—Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity—all arose around the same time in three different regions, and researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 11 have now devised a statistical model based on history and human psychology that helps to explain why. The emergence of world religions, they say, was triggered by the rising standards of living in the great civilizations of Eurasia.

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