Religion

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“ …a prominent Cambridge theologian, turned to me and said: ‘That is what makes anthropology so fascinating and so difficult too. You have to explain how people can believe such nonsense’. ”

—Dr. Pascal Boyer, commenting on religions

A religion is a systematic set of beliefs, rituals and codifications of behaviour that revolve around a particular group's worldview, and that are usually rooted in some supernatural views about the world at large and humanity's place in the world.

The system of beliefs and rules are called dogma; religions vary in how much dogma they include and how strictly they define it and enforce it.

Contents

[edit] Major features

All of the world's religions have several of the following features:

  • Mythologies, usually containing major supernatural themes. (Some accept the term of mythology, while others insist their myths are "distinct" and "unique" because they are literally true.)
  • Answers of some sort for life's mysterious questions (What happens before life and after death? What is the meaning of life? Where do lost socks go?)
  • Some explanation about the beginning and ending of the world.
  • Guidelines for morality or ethics, and how to live in the world, usually based on the dogma and mythology.
  • A requirement to have faith in the religion's ideals, mythology (as "truth"), and the legitimacy of the religion as source for the dogma.
  • Ritual acts of worship or similar observances.
  • Festivals that take place at certain times of the year, marking both historical and mythological aspects of the religion.
  • Set ways of marking rites of passage such as marriage ceremonies, funerals and initiations into adulthood.
  • Taboos; a proscribed list of things that must not be done or else very bad things will happen.

To what extent each religion has the above features varies widely. Some religions are so bereft of silliness and dogma that they could be called philosophies if their adherents did not actually adhere to them. At the other extreme, some are rife with superstition, myth taken as fact, and harshly enforced rules.

In the human nature of "us versus them", people who are not part of a given religion often use terms such as "cults" to define that religion's members. Likewise, those who are in a religion have terms like heathen, pagan or infidel for those outside the religion, and heretic for those who try to dissent within the framework of the religion.

[edit] Religion and the supernatural

A major theory of the development of religion is that the concept of "supernatural" powers (gods) socially "evolved" as a people began to speculate about the world around them, and started to say "why and how" to that natural world. Simplistic gods were believed to be in the human mindset roughly 10,000 years ago.

The first sort of "religion" that most Westerners would recognize as such likely came into being between 4000 and 2500 BCE. These religions provided solutions to how to live with others and to survive as a people and how to understand and explore the natural world, which might have been suited to the times, but became hallowed and lived on past their own obsolescence.

It is probable that at least some pagans recognized the anthropogenic nature of their gods, since practitioners of these religions are known to have deified a number of people (e.g., the Roman imperial cult). Ansgar, an archbishop of Hamburg who also carried out missions to Sweden, reported that a goði there, being opposed to Christianity, had told the locals that if they needed another god they should deify one of their dead kings instead of adopting Christianity.

[edit] Modern approaches

In the modern era, many fairly non-religious people cobble together a "personal philosophy" that is a grab-bag of the religious, philosophical, and moral concepts that they think or feel works well for them.

In contrast, in spite of so much of our understanding of the universe, there are people who insist that every teaching their religion promotes is the absolute truth - these people are called fundamentalists.

While many religionists think that the modern world's most important battles are between religious traditions, the reality is that the two most important struggles are 1)between fundamentalists of any stripe and people who are more open-minded in their beliefs, and 2) the personal struggle to internalize and reflect upon a religion, denying the religion's inherent authority to dictate one's choices, beliefs, and role in life (that is, to internalize a religion and apply active reflection upon it, question it, and as appropriate, discard all or some of it).

[edit] Religion and science

Historically, religions, especially Islam and Christianity, have asserted control over people, wealth and cultural memes. As science has improved its explanations of reality, the two bodies have experienced friction.

The histories of both Christianity and Islam have included moments where they have been the developers of new thought, science and knowledge, and conversely, there are many times when they have attempted to severely suppress science, philosophy, and free thinking.

Throughout the rest of the world, religions have generally encouraged naturalistic explorations and explanations, finding successful ways to integrate the two, or accept them as different answers for the same questions. It is difficult for most who grow up in a Western Abrahamic tradition to imagine a religion which does not, at some level, rely on supernatural or miraculous explanations.

[edit] Examples of science-friendly attitudes within religion

  • In the middle ages, the Muslim world had a mini-renaissance due to their open-mindedness towards science. This has collapsed due to the rise of fundamentalism in Islam.
  • In the modern era, many Christian denominations accept fully modern science and its ramifications. See NOMA.
  • The Irenaean theodicy to explain the existence of evil in the world is dependent upon the 'evolution' (his words) of humans. It is, perhaps, interesting to note that he was writing in 160 CE.
  • The Roman Catholic Church's acceptance of a form of evolution.
  • Zoroastrianism describes a universe with things that modern practitioners accept as 1) black holes, 2) the big bang (all sprang from nothing, an eruption of time and space), 3) simplistic relativity-friendly ideas like when gods moved too fast, they changed reality 4) evolution of earthly life from "seeded miniature life" cast off by the gods.[1]

[edit] Examples of anti-science attitudes within religion

  • Every religion that proposes supernatural causes for actual events.
  • The Roman Catholic Church's treatment of Copernicus and Galileo.
  • The opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution by fundamentalists among his contemporaries, and on down to modern times.
  • Modern opposition to stem cell research by fundamentalists (mostly in the US).

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

A rant [You tube autostart vid]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ Of course, like most mythology studies, it's all in how you read it, and how much you want science to be part of your cultural world view. The Bible has passages that a Christian could easily say represents the big bang, but the modern Christian world view is at least slightly anti-science, if not in many cases, greatly so.
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