The earliest works in CSR (Guthrie 1980; 1993; Lawson and McCauley 1990; Whitehouse 1992; 1995; Boyer 1994) agree that minds do not come automatically equipped with cognitive machinery devoted to religion. Whatever else each position affirms, all declare that religions involve cultural arrangements that effectively engage ordinary cognitive systems that are in place on the basis of considerations having nothing to do with religion or with one another. They also assert that religions are not the only cultural arrangements that do so. Folklore contains comparably amazing personages; militaries can utilize more rituals than religions. Though their ambitions vary and they attend to different cognitive capacities, these early proposals all maintain that these cognitive capacities’ exercises in religious contexts are byproducts of their normal functioning. Whether they concern anthropomorphism (Guthrie), action representation (Lawson and McCauley), episodic and autobiographical memory (Whitehouse), or all of these and more (Boyer), these cognitive capacities exist in human minds because they enable people to deal with the species’ perennial problems.