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Deity created religion through the process of revelationNatural Knowledge of God Explanation
Deity created the world and humans, established the principles and laws by which the world operates, intervenes in history, alters the normal course of events, and speaks through prophets
Through prophetic revelation, deity deliberately adds to human knowledge
All human beings are born with a fundamental awareness of the divine, a rudimentary knowledge that some greater power is ultimately responsible for what they experience (Wonder and complexity of nature, beauty in the universe, experience of the seasons, complexity of life forms)
All religions build on this fundamental awareness and make sense of it
Religions are diverse because awareness of the greater power is vague and diffuse
The story of the blind man and the elephant
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Animism - belief that inanimate as well as animate objects possess a life principle or soul of some kind that are conceived of anthropormorphically (Must be deferred to, can be placated, are dangerous)Edward Tylor
Polytheism - belief in multiple deities
Monotheism - belief in a single deity
Dreams, possess, reflections lead humans to posit a spiritual entity - a soul - separate yet connected to the bodyMax Muller
The dream experience is interpreted as one of the soul. Individuals know they are asleep but also are somewhere else
Since prehistoric people saw other people cause events, they reasoned that everything that happens must be caused by other human or humanlike agents
Religion expresses the prime values of a society and helps to perpetuate these values and the society itself. Things that have social value are elevated to having spiritual value
Mental progress evolved from magic (sympathetic and imitative) to religion to science
Sympathetic Magic (drinking the blood of an ox for strength)
Imitative Magic (drumming to produce thunderhead clouds)
Humans have four wishes/drives (security, response, recognition, new experience) that account for the need and appeal of religion
Religion fulfills fundamental human needs by explaining the uncertainties and terrors that continually threaten to overwhelm the individual
"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities." It is a dramatization, projected into cosmic order, of sentiments, fears and longings that develop from the relationship of child to parents. "If one attempts to assign religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
Religious practices are the expression of unconscious psychological forces. Humans also have a basic desire to control the terrifying forces that surround them
Religion is a means of sublimating the primitive instincts that society represses. God characters are the projections of wishes and conflicts within the person
The model for control is the child’s father, which is projected as a God character.
Religion stems primarily from the sense of guilt derived partly from the Oedipus complex and attempts by the male to construct a father image after his love affair with his mother and the ritual killing of his father
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things (things set apart and forbidden) which unite into a single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them
Religion is primarily a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members.
The object of religious veneration, therefore, is society itself
Economic forces are the principal factors in shaping human behavior. Ideas, values, and beliefs are shaped by economic forces
Religion is an expression of prevailing economic relationships
For the elites, religion serves as a tool of oppression, a rationalization and justification for elite’s own power and privilege
DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION
Issue of whether referent should be gods, beings, powersFunctional Definitions: Focus is on what religion does, how it functions for individuals and groups
Issue of whether referent should be belief or action
Issue of whether emphasis should be on separation of sacred and profane
Issue is what are the ultimate problems of human life
Issue is what kinds of belief and practice systems to include (capitalism, communism, nationalism, science)
Melford Spiro -- Religion is an institution consisting of cultural patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beingsFunctional Definition
Peter Berger -- Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established
Roland Robertson -- Religious culture is that set of beliefs and symbols pertaining to a distinction between an empirical and super-empirical transcendent reality; the affairs of the empirical being subordinated in significance to the non-empirical
J. Milton Yinger -- Religion can be defined as a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life (death, suffering, evil, injustice
Emile Durkheim -- A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred thing, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into a single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them
Felicitas Goodman -- Religion is an ancient part of human culture. It shares cross-culturally a set of universals, namely, ritual, the religious trance and its attendant ecstasy, the alternate reality, ascription to the alternate reality of changes in fortune and rituals of divination, a system of ethics and a named category.
Clifford Geertz -- Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in (people) by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic
CLASS DEFINITION OF RELIGION
Religion is the social form
that is the product of the social construction of a transcendent realm (world,
sphere, level, plane, power, force) that possesses qualitatively different
attributes, the sacred, which distinguish it from the profane, everday realm.
The social construction of religion involves creating narratives that describe
the relationship between the sacred and profane (myth), procedures through
which a relationship of the sacred and profane is maintained (ritual), and
social collectivities through which adherents organize themselves (church).
RELIGION VERSUS MAGIC
(The characteristic
of religion is listed first and of magic second for each item)
1. Sense of a "group of common believers: a church
No church or group consciousness involved
2. Moral ethos, or a system of ethics to guide behavior
No moral ethos or systematic pattern of ethics
3. Rites are meaningful; they reinforce patterns of belief
Rites not necessarily meaningful; they are used to cast a spell or make something happen
4. Rites occur calendrically
Rites occur at critical (crisis) times
5. Functions for both the individual and the structure
Functions only for individuals, not for social structure
6. Participation is open; leader leads entire group in performance of ritual
Leader is only one to know ritual and how to perform it; others present are passive
7. Worship of transcendent Being or Power as intrinsically worthy of one's attention
Manipulation of impersonal, transcendent power for
utilitarian reasons
There was no clearly designated sacred space that was set apart and used solely for religious purposesIn the post-reformation, modern Europe, the sacred and period, the sacred and profane were partitioned
There were numerous spaces that were sacred, (local wells, shrines) and churches were not treated reverentially
Rituals were calendrical through the year and structured time and schedules collectively (changing of seasons, planting harvest)
Rituals were conducted by ordinary laypersons
The sacred was treated with familiarity depending on results (reverent or irreverent treatment of saints depending upon harvest success)
Miracles were expected events
Sacred and profane space were separatedOne important aspect of establishing church control over sacred power was distinguishing “religion” from “magic”
Churches were treated as sacred space to be treated reverentially
Rituals were organized and controlled by the church around religious events
Important rituals were conducted by religious officials
The sacred was treated with awe and set apart
The church recognized only officially designated saints and approved miracles (Eucharist) and treated them with awe
Religion and magic had been previously intermingled (blessed candles)There are three basic types of relationships among humans as well as between humans and the sacred (Coercive, Utilitarian, and Normative)
Protestant religion stripped churches of material through which magical action was accomplished and Catholic religion kept only church controlled miracles
Utilitarian relationships with the sacred are defined as magic and normative relationships are defined as religion
Designating utilitarian relationships with the sacred that can be controlled by practitioners as magic is a means of politically defining and controlling “true religion”