Religion

Symbols of some of the more common religions.
Top to bottom, left to right:
Row 1. Christian, Jewish, Hindu Row 2. Islamic, Buddhist, Shinto Row 3. Sikh, Baha'i, Jain

The term religion (from Latin: religio meaning "bind, connect") denotes a set of common beliefs and practices pertaining to the supernatural (and its relationship to humanity and the cosmos), which are often codified into prayer, ritual, scriptures, and religious law. These beliefs and practices are typically defined through a shared canonical vocabulary of venerable traditions, writings, history, and mythology. Given the variety of experiential contexts that can be described as religious, the term "religion" is used to describe both individual practices and group rituals stemming from shared conviction. In addition, moral codes are often seen as an important part of religious practice.

A common element of many religious traditions is the division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane. In this context, religious thought and practice are often expended in the attempt to elucidate these two disparate realms through personal effort or communal ritual.

The social structure of the world's religious traditions can be roughly placed on continuum based on their respective levels of interpersonal involvement and social engagement. On one end of this scale would be the most inwardly-directed types, such as the desert saints of early Christianity and the monks of Hinduism. On the other hand, one would find the religious traditions that are most firmly entrenched in all aspects of personal, social, and juridical life, such as the medieval Catholic Church and the theocratic regimes of some Islamic states. All other religious traditions could be situated somewhere between these two poles. However, the multivalent interplay between the religious and secular spheres has caused some scholars to question the utility of the term "religion," as they claim that it presents these traditions in "a reified, essentialized fashion, isolated from the political, social, economic, and cultural worlds within which they are embedded."

Given its ubiquity in human affairs and world history, religion has been a perennially controversial topic for generations. The subject of religion can induce a range of responses from fear, loathing, and zenophobia on the one hand, to love and goodwill on the other. In some ways, religion is a paradox: it contains the greatest and most sublime of humanity's teachings but these teachings have sometimes been manipulated to foster hatred and horror. Yet, within religions lies hope for a better future. Thus, despite the growing dangers of religious fundamentalism, the world's religions continue to be treasure chests of spiritual resources for making a positive impact on world affairs.

"Religion" as a Term

Etymology

The English word religion has been in use since the 13th century, loaned from Anglo-French religiun (11th century), ultimately from the Latin religio, "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety, the res divinae"

The ultimate origins of Latin religio are obscure, though a historically popular derivation suggests that the term emerged from ligare "bind, connect"; likely from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or "to reconnect." This interpretation is favored by modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell, though it owes its place of promience to St. Augustine, who used it in his interpretation of Lactantius. Another possibility is derivation from a reduplicated *le-ligare. Another historical interpretation, this one offered by Cicero, connects lego "read", i.e. re (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully".

Definition

The word "Religion" has been defined in a wide variety of manners, with most definitions attempting to find a balance somewhere between overly restrictive categorizations and meaningless generalities. In this quest, a variety of approaches have been employed, including the use formalistic, doctrinal definitions, and the emphasis experiential, emotive, intuitive, valuational and ethical factors. Definitions mostly include:

• a notion of the transcendent or numinous (most important for theistic belief systems
• a cultural or behavioural aspect of ritual, liturgy and organized worship, often involving a priesthood, and societal norms of morality (ethos) and virtue
• a set of myths or sacred truths held in reverence or believed by adherents

Sociologists and anthropologists tend to see religion as an abstract set of ideas, values, or experiences developed as part of a cultural matrix. For example, in Lindbeck's Nature of Doctrine, religion does not refer to belief in "God" or a transcendent Absolute. Instead, Lindbeck defines religion as, "a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought… it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments.” According to this definition, religion refers to one's primary worldview and how this dictates one's thoughts and actions.

Other religious scholars have put forward a definition of religion that avoids the reductionism of the various sociological and psychological disciplines that reduce religion to its component factors. Religion may be defined as the presence of a belief in the sacred or the holy. For example Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy," formulated in 1917, defines the essence of religious awareness as awe, a unique blend of fear and fascination before the divine. Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as a "feeling of absolute dependence."

The Encyclopedia of Religion defines religion this way:

In summary, it may be said that almost every known culture involves the religious in the above sense of a depth dimension in cultural experiences at all levels — a push, whether ill-defined or conscious, toward some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life. When more or less distinct patterns of behaviour are built around this depth dimension in a culture, this structure constitutes religion in its historically recognizable form. Religion is the organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience — varied in form, completeness, and clarity in accordance with the environing culture.

Other encyclopedic definitions include: "A general term used... to designate all concepts concerning the belief in god(s) and goddess(es) as well as other spiritual beings or transcendental ultimate concerns" and "human beings' relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine."

All of this being said, some scholars call the utility of the term "religion" into question, as it creates (or reifies) a distinction between the secular and sacred elements of human existence that may bear little relation to the lived experience of believers. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues, "[r]eligion [as a discrete category] is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization." Such critiques, and the porous, multivalent understanding of religion that they engender, should be taken into account throughout the following discussion.

Usage

In the earliest Latin accounts, the term "religion" was used exclusively to describe proper religious praxis — a sense of the term that was inherited by early Christian writers. Jonathan Z. Smith provides an excellent overview of this restrictive usage:

In both Roman and early Christian Latin usage, the noun forms religio/religiones and, most especially, the adjectival religiosus and the adverbial religiose were cultic terms referring primarily to the careful performance of ritual obligations. This sense survives in the English adverbial construction "religiously" designating a conscientious repetitive action.... The only distinctly Christian usage was the fifth-century extension of this cultic sense to the totality of an individual's life in monasticism: "religion," a life bound by monastic vows; "religious," a monk; "to enter religion," to join a monastery. It is this technical vocabulary that is first extended to non-Christian examples in the literature of exploration, particularly in the descriptions of the complex civilizations of Mesoamerica."

In keeping with the term's Latin origins, religious believers have characterized other belief systems as immoral forms of superstition. Likewise, some atheists, agnostics, deists, and skeptics regard all religious belief as superstition, as in Edmund Burke famous quip that "superstition is the religion of feeble minds." Religious practices are most likely to be labeled "superstitious" by outsiders when they include belief in extraordinary events (miracles), an afterlife, supernatural interventions, apparitions or the efficacy of prayer, charms, incantations, the meaningfulness of omens, and prognostications. Greek and Roman pagans, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. "Such fear of the gods (deisidaimonia) was what the Romans meant by 'superstition' (Veyne 1987, p 211). Early Christianity was outlawed as a superstitio Iudaica, a "Jewish superstition", by Domitianin the 80s AD, and by AD 425, Theodosius II outlawed Roman "pagan" traditions as superstitious.

The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion." The Catechism clearly dispels commonly held preconceptions or misunderstandings about Catholic doctrine relating to superstitious practices:

Superstition is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition.

History

Development of religion

There are a number of models regarding the ways in which religions come into being and develop. Broadly speaking, these models fall into three categories (as discussed below):

• Models which see religions as social constructions;
• Models which see religions as progressing toward higher, objective truth;
• Models which see a particular religion as absolutely true.

However, these models are not mutually exclusive, as multiple elements may be seen to apply simultaneously, or different models may be seen as applying more fittingly to different religions.

Pre-modern Religious Thought

In pre-modern (pre-urban) societies, religion is one defining factor of ethnicity, along with language, regional customs, national costume, etc. As Xenophanes famously comments:

Men make gods in their own image; those of the Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair. If horses or oxen or lions had hands and could produce works of art, they too would represent the gods after their own fashion.

Ethnic religions may include officially sanctioned and organized civil religions with an organized clergy, but they are characterized in that adherents generally are defined by their ethnicity, and conversion essentially equates to cultural assimilation to the people in question. The notion of gentiles ("nations") in Judaism reflect this state of affairs, the implicit assumption that each nation will have its own religion. Historical examples include Germanic polytheism, Celtic polytheism, Slavic polytheism and pre-Hellenistic Greek religion.

The "Axial Age"

Karl Jaspers, a prominent figure in the academic study of religion, posited a "quantum leap" in religious thought that occurred simultaneously on various parts of the planet in the six hundred year span between 800 and 200 B.C.E. This axial age, which he describes in his Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), was host to a number of key religious figures (such as Plato, Heraclitus, Laozi, Mencius, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Siddhartha Gautama, and the writers of the Upanishads), each of whom immeasurably extended the humanistic and metaphysical bases of their respective traditions. Jaspers saw in these developments in religion and philosophy a striking parallel without any obvious direct transmission of ideas from one region to the other, having found no recorded proof of any extensive inter-communication between Ancient Greece, the Middle East, India and China. This historical periodization has been adopted the majority of scholars and academics, and has become a point of discussion in the history of religion.

Some of the more notable concepts to emerge in the Axial Age included the development of monism and monotheism, notably the Platonic idealism in Hellenistic philosophy, the notion of atman in Vedanta, the notion of Dao in Daoism, and the so-called Golden Rule, which emerged independently in the writings of virtually all thinkers of the period.

Middle Ages

The present-day world religions established themselves throughout Eurasia during the Middle Ages through various world-expanding processes, including the "Christianization" of the West, the transmission of Buddhism to East Asia along the Silk Road, the decline of Indian Buddhism, the rise of Hinduism in India, and the spread of Islam throughout the Near East and much of Central Asia. In the High Middle Ages, Islam was in conflict with Christianity during the Crusades and with Hinduism in the Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent.

Many medieval religious movements emphasized mysticism, such as the Cathars, various Christian mystic saints (e.g., Hildegard of Bingen), Jewish Kabbala, the Bhakti movement in India, Sufism in Islam, and Zen Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism in the Far East. Monotheism became universally accepted as a dogma in Christian Christology and in Islamic Tawhid. Likewise, Hindu monistic notions of Brahman reached their classical form in the teaching of Adi Shankara.

Modern period

European colonization during the 15th to 19th centuries resulted in the spread of Christianity to Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Australia and the Philippines. The 18th century saw the beginning of secularization in Europe, which rose to prominence due to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

In the 20th century, the regimes of Communist Eastern Europe and Communist China were explicitly anti-religious. A great variety of cults and new religious movements originated in the 20th century, many proposing syncretism of elements of established religions. Adherence to such new movements is limited, however, remaining below 2% worldwide in the 2000s. Adherents of the classical world religions account for more than 75% of the world's population, while adherence to indigenous tribal religions has fallen to 4%. As of 2005, an estimated 14% of the world's population identifies as nonreligious.

Demographics

Religious traditions fall into super-groups in comparative religion, arranged by historical origin and mutual influence. In this framework, the term "Abrahamic" describes those which originated in the Middle East, "Indian [/Indic]" depicts those that emerged in India, and "Far Eastern [/Daoic]" refers to those that arose in East Asia. Another group with supra-regional influence are African diasporic religions, which have their origins in Central and West Africa.

File:Worldwide percentage of Adherents by Religion.png

Major religious groups as a percentage of the world population in 2005 (Encyclopaedia Britannica). In summary, religious adherence of the world's population is as follows: Abrahamic: 53.5%, Indian: 19.7%, irreligious: 14.3%, Far Eastern: 6.5%, tribal religions: 4.0%, new religious movements: 2.0%.

• Abrahamic religions are by far the largest group, and these consist primarily of Christianity, Islam and Judaism (sometimes Bahá'í is also included). They are named for the patriarch Abraham, and are unified by their strict monotheism. Today, around 3.4 billion people are followers of Abrahamic religions and they are spread widely around the world (with the exception of South-East Asia).
• Indian religions originated in Greater India and tend to share a number of key concepts, such as dharma and karma. They are most influential across the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, South East Asia, as well as in isolated parts of Russia. The main Indian religions are Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.
• Far Eastern religions consist of several East Asian religions which make use of the concept of Tao (in Chinese) or Do (in Japanese or Korean). They include Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Chondogyo, and Caodaism, as well as Far Eastern Buddhism (which represents an overlap between the "Far Eastern" and "Indian" groups).
• Iranic religions include Zoroastrianism, Yazdanism and historical traditions of Gnosticism (Mandaeanism, Manichaeism). Though distinct from the Abrahamic traditions, Iranian religious ideas have extensively influenced the outlook and spiritual practice of the other Middle Eastern faiths (as evidenced in Christian Gnosticism and Sufism), as well as in recent movements such as Bábísm and the Bahá'í Faith.
• African diasporic religions practiced in the Americas, imported as a result of the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th to 18th centuries, based upon the traditional religions of Central and West Africa.
• Indigenous tribal religions, formerly found on every continent, but now marginalized by the major organized faiths. Despite this, they often persist as undercurrents of folk religion. This category includes African traditional religions, Asian Shamanism, Native American religions, Austronesian and Australian Aboriginal traditions and arguably Chinese folk religion (overlaps with Far Eastern religions).
• New religious movements, a heterogeneous group of religious faiths emerging since the 19th century, often syncretizing, re-interpreting or reviving aspects of older traditions (Bahá'í, Hindu revivalism, Ayyavazhi, Pentecostalism, polytheistic reconstructionism), some inspired by science-fiction (UFO religions, Scientology).

Demographic distribution of the major super-groupings mentioned is shown in the table below:

Name of Group	Name of Religion	Number of followers	Date of Origin	Main regions covered
Abrahamic religions 3.4 billion	Christianity	2.1 billion	1st c.	Worldwide except Northwest Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and parts of Central, East, and Southeast Asia.
	Islam	1.5 billion	7th c.	Middle East, Northern Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Western Africa, Eastern Africa, Indian subcontinent, Russia, China, Balkans, Malay Archipelago
	Judaism	14 million	Iron Age	Israel, USA, Europe
	Bahá'í Faith	7 million	19th c.	Dispersed worldwide with no major population centers
Indian religions 1.4 billion	Hinduism	900 million	no founder	Indian subcontinent, Fiji, Guyana and Mauritius
	Buddhism	376 million	Iron Age	Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Indochina, regions of Russia.
	Sikhism	23 million	16th c.	India, Pakistan, Africa, Canada, USA, United Kingdom
	Jainism	4.2 million	Iron Age	India, and East Africa
Far Eastern religions 500 million	Taoism	unknown	Spring and Autumn Period	China and the Chinese diaspora
	Confucianism	unknown	Spring and Autumn Period	China, Korea, Vietnam and the Chinese and Vietnamese diasporas
	Shinto	4 million	no founder	Japan
	Caodaism	1-2 million	1925	Vietnam
	Chondogyo	1.13 million	1812	Korea
	Yiguandao	1-2 million	c. 1900	Taiwan
	Chinese folk religion	394 million	no founder	China
Ethnic/tribal 400 million
	Primal indigenous	300 million	no founder	India, Asia
	African traditional and diasporic	100 million	no founder	Africa, Americas

Groups estimated to exceed 500,000 adherents which are not listed under any of the categories above are the following:

• Juche (North Korea): 19 million
• Spiritism (not an organized religion): 15 million
• Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
• Neopaganism: 1 million
• Unitarian-Universalism: 800,000
• Rastafarianism: 600,000
• Scientology: 500,000

Religious belief

Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are one, a painting in the litang style portraying three men laughing by a river stream, 12th century, Song Dynasty.

Religious belief usually relates to the existence, nature and worship of a deity or deities, and to faith in divine involvement in the universe and human life. Alternately, it may also relate to values and practices transmitted by a spiritual leader. Unlike other belief systems, which may be passed on orally, religious belief tends to be codified in literate societies (whereas religion in non-literate societies is still largely passed on orally).

Related forms of thought

Religion, metaphysics, and cosmology

Religion and philosophy meet in several areas, notably in the study of metaphysics and cosmology. In particular, a distinct set of religious beliefs will often entail a specific metaphysics and cosmology. That is, a religion will generally have answers to metaphysical and cosmological questions about the nature of being, of the universe, humanity, and the divine.

Given the generalized discontents with modernity, consumerism, over-consumption, violence and anomie, many people in the so-called industrial or post-industrial West rely on a number of distinctive religious world views. This, in turn, has given rise to increased religious pluralism, as well as to what are commonly known in the academic literature as new religious movements, which are gaining adherents around the globe. As suggested above, religious systems (both traditional and modern) are increasing in influence due to their perceived response to the failure of modern (secular) idealism.

Spirituality

Members of an organized religion may not see any significant difference between religion and spirituality. Or they may see a distinction between the mundane, earthly aspects of their religion and its spiritual dimension.

Some individuals draw a strong distinction between religion and spirituality. They may see spirituality as a belief in ideas of religious significance (such as God, the Soul, or Heaven), but not feel bound to the bureaucratic structure and creeds of a particular organized religion. In this context, the term spirituality is often consciously chosen in opposition to the designation "religion," perhaps reflecting a disillusionment with organized religion and a movement towards a more "modern" (i.e., more tolerant and more intuitive) form of religious practice. These individuals may reject organized religion because of historical acts by religious organizations, such as Christian Crusades, the Islamic Jihad, the Spanish Inquisition, and the marginalisation and persecution of various minorities.

Mysticism and esotericism

File:7BrahmanMH.jpg

Man meditating

Mysticism, in contrast with philosophy, denies that logic is the most important method of gaining enlightenment. Rather, physical disciplines such as yoga, stringent fasting, whirling (in the case of the Sufi dervishes), or the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD, lead to altered states of consciousness that logic can never hope to grasp.

From a religious standpoint, mysticism it thought of as religious practice meant enable communion with (or conscious awareness of) Ultimate Reality, the Divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct, personal experience (intuition or insight) rather than rational thought. Mystics speak of the existence of realities behind external perception or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible through personal experience. They say that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge.

Esotericism claims to be more sophisticated than religion, to rely on intellectual understanding rather than faith, and to improve on philosophy in its emphasis on techniques of psycho-spiritual transformation (esoteric cosmology). Esotericism refers to "hidden" knowledge available only to the advanced, privileged, or initiated, as opposed to exoteric knowledge, which is public. It applies especially to spiritual practices. The mystery religions of ancient Greece, the Gnostic systems of the Middle East, and the Hindu path of jnana marga are examples of esoteric religiosity.

Myth

The word myth has several meanings.

1. A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon;
2. A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
3. A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being.

Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called "myths" in the anthropology of religion. The term "myth" can be used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. By defining another person's religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one's own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked, "Mythology is often thought of as other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology."

In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the death and resurrection of Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin and is also ostensibly a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old "life" and the start of a new "life" is what is most significant.

Urarina shaman, 1988

Cosmology

Humans have many different methods which attempt to answer fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and our place in it (cosmology). Religion is only one of the methods for trying to answer one or more of these questions. Other methods include science, philosophy, metaphysics, astrology, esotericism, mysticism, and forms of Shamanism

Religion and science

Religious knowledge, according to religious practitioners, may be gained from religious leaders, sacred texts, and/or personal revelation. Some religions view such knowledge as unlimited in scope and suitable to answer any question; others see religious knowledge as playing a more restricted role, often as a complement to knowledge gained through physical observation. Some religious people maintain that religious knowledge obtained in this way is absolute and infallible, usually due to a fundamentalist certainty in the inerrancy of their scriptures.

Early science such as geometry and astronomy was connected to the divine for most medieval scholars. The compass in this 13th Century manuscript is a symbol of God's act of creation.

In contrast to the intuitive process of knowing advocated by many religious groups, the scientific method states that knowledge must be gained by using empirical facts to test hypotheses and develop theories. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is probabilistic and subject to later improvement or revision in the face of better evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as facts (such as the theories of gravity or evolution). The logically-positivistic approach only answers cosmological questions about the physical universe, often suggesting that other types of knowing are fallacious.

This being said, many scientists held strong religious beliefs and worked to harmonize science and religion. Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the Sun, and credited God with the design. In the concluding General Scholium to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Nevertheless, conflict arose between religious organizations and individuals who propagated scientific theories which were deemed unacceptable by the organizations. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has in the past reserved to itself the right to decide which scientific theories were acceptable and which were unacceptable. In the 17th century, Galileo was tried and forced to recant the heliocentric theory based on the medieval church's stance that the Greek Hellenistic system of astronomy was the correct one.

The philosophical approach known as pragmatism, as propounded by the American philosopher William James, has been used to reconcile scientific with religious knowledge. Pragmatism, simplistically, holds that the truth of a set of beliefs can be indicated by its usefulness in helping people cope with a particular context of life. Thus, the fact that scientific beliefs are useful in predicting observations in the physical world can indicate a certain truth for scientific theories; the fact that religious beliefs can be useful in helping people cope with difficult emotions or moral decisions can indicate a certain truth for those beliefs.

Approaches to the Study of Religion

Methods of studying religion objectively (in a scientific and religiously neutral fashion)

There are a variety of methods employed to study religion that seek to be phenomenologically neutral. One's interpretation of these methods depends on one's approach to the relationship between religion and science, as discussed above.

• Epistemological and ontological approaches to religion deal with the very nature of how one comes accept any belief or assumption as true on it's own terms and questions such matters of the nature of reality and existence of the universe and humanity. Such an approach may begin from philosophic first principles of epistemology and philosophic logic such as the law of non-contradiction, the law of exluded middle and others. This is perhaps one of the strongest approaches as one's assumptions here will underline one's assumptions and subsequent approaches to analysis of all of the history, people, sciences (or pseudosciences), humanities and social sciences, texts, ideologies, literatures, emotions and experiences associated with religions.

• Historical, archeological, and literary approaches to religion include attempts to discover early spiritual intuitions through the study of sacred writings and archeological evidence. For example, Max Müller in 1879 launched a project to translate the earliest sacred texts of Hinduism into English in the Sacred Books of the East. Müller's intent was to translate for the first time the "bright" as well as the "dark sides" of non-Christian religions into English. [2]

• Anthropological approaches include attempts to lay out the principles of native tribes that have had little contact with modern technology as in John Lubbock's The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. [3]

The term "religion" is problematic for anthropologists, and their approaches to the subject are quite varied. Some take the view that religion, particularly in less technically complex cultures, is a form of proto-science—a primitive attempt to explain and predict phenomena in the natural world, similar to modern science but less advanced.

However, most modern anthropologists reject this view as antiquated, ethnically and intellectually chauvinistic, and unsupported by cross-cultural evidence. Science has very specific methods and aims, while the term "religion" encompasses a huge spectrum of practices, goals, and social functions. In addition to explaining the world (natural or otherwise), religions may also provide mechanisms for maintaining social and psychological well-being, and the foundations of moral/ethical, economic, and political reasoning.

While many early anthropologists attempted to catalogue and universalize these functions and their origins, modern researchers have tended to back away from such speculation, preferring a more holistic approach: The object of study is the meaning of religious traditions and practices for the practitioners themselves—religion in context—rather than formalized theories about religion in general.

• Sociological approaches include attempts to explain the relationship between religious thought/practice and social realities (most typically, the development of morality and law). An early example of this approach can be seen in Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1842), which hypothesizes that that a society's religious mindset goes through the following stages of evolution: 1) obeying supernatural beings, 2) manipulating abstract unseen forces, and 3) exploring more or less scientifically the social laws and practical governmental structures that work in practice. Within a sociological approach, religion is but the earliest primitive stage of discovering what is socially expedient and morally right in a civilized society. It is the duty of intelligent men and women everywhere to take responsibility for shaping the society without appealing to a (potentially non-existent) Divinity and to discover empirically what moral concepts actually work in practice. Comte wrote, in translation, "It can not be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon Opinions. The great political and moral crisis that societies are now undergoing is shown by a rigid analysis to arise out of intellectual anarchy." The intellectual anarchy includes the warring oppositions among the world's religions. [4] In a later sociological approach, Rodney Stark has met with considerable success in his attempt to analyze the social forces that have caused religions to expand over time and the features of these religions that have been most successful in weathering changes in social circumstance. For example, Stark hypothesizes that, before Christianity became established as the state religion of Constantinople, it grew rapidly because it provided a practical framework within which non-family members would provide help to other people in the community in a barter system of mutual assistance. Similarly, evolutionary psychology approaches consider the survival advantages that religion might have given to a community of hunter-gatherers, such as unifying them within a coherent social group.

• Philosophical approaches include attempts to derive rational classifications of the views of the world that religions preach as in Immanuel Kant's 1788 Critique of Practical Reason. Within a philosophical approach, the reason for a religious belief should be more important than the emotional attachment to the belief. [5] And in attempting to provide a reasonable basis for morality, Kant proposed the categorical imperative: "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." [6]

• Psychological approaches. The psychology of religion involves the gathering and classification of various types of data and the building of the explanations of the psychological processes underlying the religious experiences and beliefs. It includes a wide variety of researches (psychoanalytical and others) : Sigmund Freud (Oedipus Complex, Illusion), Carl Jung (Universal archetypes), Erich Fromm (Desire, Need for stable frame), William James (Personal religious experience, Pragmatism), Alfred Adler (Feeling of inferiority, Perfection), Ludwig Feuerbach (Imagination, Wishes, Fear of Death), Gordon Alport (Mature religion and Immature religion), Erik Erikson (Influence on personality development), Rudolf Otto (Non-rational experience), James Leuba (Mystical experiences and drugs).

• Neuroscientific approaches seek to explore the apparent similarities among religious views dominant in diverse cultures that have had little or no contact, why religion is found in almost every human group, and why humans accept counterintuitive statements in the name of religion. In neuroscience, work by scientists such as Ramachandran and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego [7] suggests evidence of brain circuitry in the temporal lobe associated with intense religious experiences. See also neurotheology, the scientific study of the biological basis of spiritual experience.

• Cognitive psychological approaches take a completely different approach to explaining religion. Foremost among them is Pascal Boyer, whose book, Religion Explained, lays out the basics of his theory, and attempts to refute several previous and more direct explanations for the phenomenon of religion. Religion is taken in its widest sense (from holy mountains over ancestral spirits to monotheistic deities). An explanation is offered for human religious behaviour without making a presumption, to the positive or the negative, about the actual subject matter of the religious beliefs. Essentially, the reasoning goes that religion is a side effect to the normal functioning of certain subconscious intuitive mental faculties which normally apply to physics (enabling prediction of the arc a football will take only seconds after its release, for example), and social networks (to keep track of other people's identity, history, loyalty, etc.), and a variety of others. For instance, the same mechanism that serves to link, without explaining, an event (e.g. rustling of tall grass) with a cause (the possible presence of a predator) will help to form or sustain a belief that two random events are linked, or that an unexplained event is linked to supernatural causes. The reasoning would imply that there is no direct causal link between the subject matter of a belief (e.g. whether the ancestors watch over us) and the fact that there is such a belief.

For a discussion of the struggle to attain objectivity in the scientific study of religion, see Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey (ISBN 1581344589), who argues that some studies performed pursuant to these methods make claims beyond the realm of observable and verifiable phenomena, and are therefore neither scientific nor religiously neutral.

Methods of studying religion subjectively (in relation to one's own beliefs)

These include efforts to determine the meaning and application of "sacred" texts and beliefs in the context of the student's personal worldview. This generally takes one of three forms:

• one's own — efforts by believers to ascertain the meaning of their own sacred text or other traditions, and to conform their thoughts and actions to the principles enunciated in those traditions. For most believers, this involves a lifetime process of study, analysis, and practice. Some faiths, such as Hasidic Judaism, emphasize adherence to a set of rules and rituals. Other faiths, such as Christianity, emphasize the internalization and application of a set of abstract principles, such as Love, Justice, or Faith. Some believers interpret their scriptures literally, and apply the text exactly as it is written. Other believers try to interpret scripture and other tradition through its context, to derive abstract principles which they may apply more directly to their lives and contexts.
  File:Egypt.Aswan.Mosque.01.jpg

  Mosque; Aswan, Egypt.

• another's compared to one's own — efforts by believers of one belief system attempt to describe a different belief system in terms of their own beliefs. One example of this method is in David Strauss's 1835 The Life of Jesus. Strauss's theological approach strikes from the Biblical text the descriptions of angels and miracles which, due to his presupposition that supernatural events do not occur, he does not believe could have occurred. He then concludes that the stories must have been inserted by a "supernaturalist" merely trying to make an important story more convincing. In this course of his argument, Strauss argues that the supernaturalist who inserted the angels into the story of the birth of Christ borrowed the heathen doctrine of angels from the Babylonians who had held the Jews in captivity. That is, the New Testament's fabulous role for angels "is evidently a product of the influence of the Zend religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind." Due to his presumption that supernatural events do not occur, he dismisses the possibility that both cultures came to believe in angels independently, as a result of their own experiences and context.

• another's as defined by itself — efforts by believers of one belief system to understand the heart and meaning of another faith on its own terms. This very challenging approach to understanding religion presumes that each religion is a self-consistent system whereby a set of beliefs and actions depend upon each other for coherence, and can only be understood in relation to each other. This method requires the student to investigate the philosophical, emotional, religious, and social presuppositions that adherents of another religion develop and apply in their religious life, before applying their own biases, and evaluating the other faith. For instance, an individual who personally does not believe in miracles may attempt to understand why adherents of another religion believe in miracles, and then attempt to understand how the individual's belief in miracles affects their daily life. While the individual may still himself not believe in miracles, he may begin to develop an understanding of why people of other faiths choose to believe in them.

Criticism

Most western criticism of religion focuses on the Abrahamic religions—particularly Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — with titles such as Why I am not a Christian, The God Delusion and The End of Faith representing some popular published books. Not all the criticisms would apply to all religions: criticism regarding the existence of god(s), for example, has very little relevance to some forms of Buddhism.

Critics consider all religious faith essentially irrational.

Many critics claim dogmatic religions are typically morally deficient, elevating to moral status ancient, arbitrary, and ill-informed rules that may have been designed for reasons of hygiene, politics, or other reasons in a bygone era.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Saint Augustine; The Confessions of Saint Augustine (John K. Ryan translator); Image (1960), ISBN 0-385-02955-1.
• Descartes, René; Meditations on First Philosophy; Bobbs-Merril (1960), ISBN 0-672-60191-5.
• Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); Our Oriental Heritage; MJF Books (1997), ISBN 1-56731-012-5.
• Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); Caesar and Christ; MJF Books (1994), ISBN 1-56731-014-1
• Durant, Will (& Ariel (uncredited)); The Age of Faith; Simon & Schuster (1980), ISBN 0-671-01200-2.
• Marija Gimbutas 1989. The Language of the Goddess. Thames and Hudson New York
• Gonick, Larry; The Cartoon History of the Universe; Doubleday, vol. 1 (1978) ISBN 0-385-26520-4, vol. II (1994) ISBN#0-385-42093-5, W. W. Norton, vol. III (2002) ISBN 0-393-05184-6.
• Haisch, Bernard The God Theory: Universes, Zero-point Fields, and What's Behind It All — discussion of science vs. religion (Preface), Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006, ISBN 1-57863-374-5
• Lao Tzu; Tao Te Ching (Victor H. Mair translator); Bantam (1998).
• Marx, Karl; "Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right", Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, (1844).
• Saler, Benson; "Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories" (1990), ISBN 1-57181-219-9
• The Holy Bible, King James Version; New American Library (1974).
• The Koran; Penguin (2000), ISBN 0-14-044558-7.
• The Origin of Live & Death, African Creation Myths; Heinemann (1966).
• Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia; Penguin (1971).
• The World Almanac (annual), World Almanac Books, ISBN 0-88687-964-7.
• The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences - American Journal of Psychiatry 160:1965-1969, November 2003.
• United States Constitution
• Selected Work Marcus Tullius Cicero
• The World Almanac (for numbers of adherents of various religions), 2005
• Religion [First Edition]. Winston King. Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay Jones. Vol. 11. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. p7692-7701.
• World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-cultural Perspective by Andrey Korotayev, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7734-6310-0.

On religion definition:

• the first major study: Durkheim, Emile (1976) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allen & Unwin (originally published 1915, English translation 1915).
• a distillation of the Western folk category of religion: Geertz, Clifford. 1993 [1966]. Religion as a cultural system. Pp. 87-125 in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana Press.
• an operational definition: Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1966. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House. (p. 62-66)
• a recent overview: A Scientific Definition of Religion. By Ph.D. James W. Dow.

External links

All links retrieved December 22, 2007

• Studying Religion - Introduction to the methods and scholars of the academic study of religion
• Full-text search engine - Searchable sacred texts of the major World Religions
• Guide to World Religions
• A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right - Marx's original reference to religion as the opium of the people.
• Religious tolerance
• The Complexity of Religion and the Definition of “Religion” in International Law Harvard Human Rights Journal article from the President and Fellows of Harvard College(2003)
• Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents by Adherents.com (August 28, 2005) Retrieved December 22, 2005
• Philosophy and religion - an overview

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