方法对比

	Comparative Method in Religion	Moralizing Gods Database Analysis
领域	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
方法族	Process / pipeline	Regression model
起源年份	1982	2015
提出者	F. Max Müller (founder); reconceived by Jonathan Z. Smith	Peter Turchin and the Seshat: Global History Databank team
类型	Cross-traditional comparative analysis	Cross-cultural quantitative database analysis
开创性文献	Smith, J. Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226763606	Turchin, P., Brennan, R., Currie, T., et al. (2015). Seshat: The Global History Databank. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 6(1), 77-107.
别名	Comparative Religion, Cross-Cultural Comparison of Religions, Comparativism in Religious Studies, Science of Religion (Comparative)	Big Gods Database Analysis, Seshat Moralizing-Gods Analysis, Cross-Cultural Big Gods Modeling, Moralizing High Gods Coding
相关	3	3
摘要	The comparative method in religion is the systematic comparison of two or more religious traditions to identify similarities, differences, and patterns, and through them to understand religion more broadly. Founded as a discipline by F. Max Müller in the nineteenth century - who borrowed Goethe's dictum that to know one religion is to know none - the comparative project was sharply rethought in the twentieth, above all by Jonathan Z. Smith. In Imagining Religion (1982) and later work, Smith insisted that comparison is not a natural perception of objective resemblance but a scholarly act: the comparativist must specify the respect in which things are being compared (the tertium comparationis), choose comparanda for a reason, and remain answerable for the differences as much as the similarities. The method thus combines disciplined juxtaposition with explicit theory about why and how a comparison is made.	Moralizing gods database analysis is a cross-cultural quantitative method that codes the presence of moralizing or 'big' supernatural enforcers and measures of social complexity across many historical polities over time, then models their relationship. The exemplary infrastructure is the Seshat: Global History Databank, introduced by Peter Turchin and colleagues in 2015, which records hundreds of polities on standardized variables - population, territory, hierarchy, infrastructure, information systems, and religious features - with explicit sources and uncertainty codes. A high-profile 2019 Nature paper using Seshat data argued that complex societies tend to precede moralizing gods; that paper was retracted in 2021 over its treatment of missing data. The method is therefore best understood not as a settled finding but as a databank-driven analytical pipeline whose results depend critically on coding decisions, missing-data handling, and modeling of temporal and phylogenetic dependence.