Civilizations and world religions

1
Civilizations and world religions

• 2. Lecture.
• The formal and sociological theory of the
  religions and civilizations

2
The elements of evolutionary theory of religion

• 1. The interpretation of the origins of religion
  by the help of basic catherogies of evolution,
  (such as inheritance, mutation, selection,
  adaptation, etc.)
• 2a. The interpretation of religion as a social,
  gadgeteered construction, as an adaptation, (a
  function that helps the survival).
• 2b. The presentation of such functions, which
  helps the individuals and the group to solve
  certain problems in the actual situation, or in
  the actual level of evolution. (So, due to which
  function it is an adaptation, and not a
  by-product or a bug).
• 3. The understanding of why is the unfolding of
  evolutionary story that lead to the present,
  (just so story). In evolution the answer to a
  question is always a story.

3
What is religion? In the prespective of
evolutionary theory

• 1. Religion is a cultural universal it could
  be found in every known present and past (after
  its material mementos known) societies.
• Concerning sociologists (Durkheim, Murdock,
  Lévi-Strauss, Donald Brown, etc.) a cultural
  universal is an element, pattern, trait, or
  institution that is common to all human cultures
  worldwide.

4
Concept of religion

• Religion is a collection of cultural systems,
  belief systems, and worldviews that establishes
  symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and,
  sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have
  narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred
  histories that are intended to give meaning to
  life or to explain the origin of life or the
  universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics,
  religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from
  their ideas about the cosmos and human nature,
  (Wikipedia, Religion).
• Religion always implies a certain idea or
  conception of transcendence. Religion, as a
  cultural system, contains rites, rituals,
  festivals, which express in a peculiar manner the
  particular conception of transcendence of the
  religion in question. Religion implies the norms
  of both collective and individual praxis of
  living through the transcendence.
• In the sociological context of religion, a
  religious person in the first instance is a
  member of a religious community or society.

5
Further definitions of religion

• The word religion is sometimes used
  interchangeably with faith or belief system, but
  religion differs from private belief in that it
  has a public aspect, (Wikipedia, Religion). That
  is to say in sociological respect religion is
  not exclusively about personal or individual
  faith, but it implies also institutions,
  prescriptions and norms of how to practice your
  belief in a religious community, systematic order
  of religious doctrines and texts, which are kept
  sacred, and considered to have a peculiar
  relationship with transcendence.
• Anthropologists John Monoghan and Peter Just It
  seems apparent that one thing religion or belief
  helps us do is deal with problems of human life
  that are significant, persistent, and
  intolerable. One important way in which religious
  beliefs accomplish this is by providing a set of
  ideas about how and why the world is put together
  that allows people to accommodate anxieties and
  deal with misfortune

6
Religion, culture, society

• The development of religion has taken different
  forms in different cultures, (Source
  Wikipedia).
• The development of religion describes the stages
  in the evolution of any particular religious
  system from the perspective of social sciences.
  It includes such considerations as the
  evolutionary origins of religions and the
  evolutionary psychology of religions the history
  of religions, including Prehistoric and
  Paleolithic religion and the development of new
  religions and world religions. (Source
  Wikipedia).
• The particular form of a concrete religion
  depends strongly on the particular sociological,
  historical and also geographical and other
  circumstances of the religion in question. The
  historical development of a religion is strongly
  determined by these factors, and also by more
  important events of the particular society, and
  by events of intercultural communication.

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Social and cultural functions of religion

• Some religions place an emphasis on belief,
  while others emphasize practice. Some religions
  focus on the subjective experience of the
  religious individual, while others consider the
  activities of the religious community to be most
  important. Some religions claim to be universal,
  believing their laws and cosmology to be binding
  for everyone, while others are intended to be
  practiced only by a closely defined or localized
  group. In many places religion has been
  associated with public institutions such as
  education, hospitals, the family, government, and
  political hierarchies, (Source Wikipedia).
• These particular functions, as mentioned above,
  chiefly determined and grounded by the particular
  development and evolution of the concrete
  society.
• Religion as such has a provable evolutionary
  function it increases the sociological cohesion
  of a society, it means a source of cultural
  identity, by virtue of which it improves the
  chances of survival for the particular society.
  It is an advantage in regard of group-selection.

8
Current issues concerning religions

• Understanding the relationship between religion
  and society helps you a lot to conceive social
  trends and tendencies today.
• Spread of religious tolerance in contemporary
  western societies.
• Example No.1. During the presidential campaign
  (1961) of John Fitzgerald Kennedy there was a
  definite reluctance about his being a catholic in
  the protestant-dominated USA. But now (2012) a
  few has any aversion about the fact, that the
  republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is
  a committed Mormon.
• Example No.2. A few days ago the Al-Kaida
  propagandist, extremist Islam leader, Abu Katada
  was set free in London though he continuously
  makes preaches against the tolerant Western World
  and England in particular. Human rights
  protectors told that one has the right to follow
  the extremist ways of a religion too. What do you
  think about this question?

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The guideline of the courseReligious studies

• During the course we will try to analyze and
  discuss several current and relevant issues
  concerning the relationship of religion and
  modern society.
• But the main theoretical discipline we will keep
  in view is religious studies in general and
  comparative religions in particular.

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Theology and comparative religions

• Religious studies is the academic field of
  multi-disciplinary, secular study of religious
  beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. It
  describes, compares, interprets, and explains
  religion, emphasizing systematic, historically
  based, and cross-cultural perspectives.
• While theology attempts to understand the nature
  and intentions of supernatural forces (such as
  deities), religious studies tries to study
  religious behavior and belief from outside any
  particular religious viewpoint. Religious studies
  draws upon multiple disciplines and their
  methodologies including anthropology, sociology,
  psychology, philosophy, and history of religions.

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Methodological atheism

• Methodological atheism is a key-concept to
  understand the difference between religious
  studies and theology.
• The concept was introduced by the contemporary
  sociologist of religions, Peter Ludwig Berger
  (1929-).
• The term refers to a necessarily methodological
  operation. Working as a scientist, the researcher
  must bracket her/his religious beliefs, she or
  he must abstract from her/his religious
  commitment.
• Whereas the sociology of religion broadly
  differs from theology in assuming the invalidity
  of the supernatural, theorists tend to
  acknowledge socio-cultural reification of
  religious practise. That means religious ideas
  do have a sort of sociological effectivity.

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Origins of Religious Studies

• Religious studies originated in the nineteenth
  century, when scholarly and historical analysis
  of the Bible had flourished, and Hindu and
  Buddhist texts were first being translated into
  European languages.
• Early influential scholars included Friedrich Max
  Müller (German philologist and orientalist), in
  England, and Comelius P. Tiele (theologian), in
  the Netherlands.
• Religious studies also owes a lot to the
  historical-philological analyses of Bible (David
  Strauß, The life of Jesus), and
  classical-philological investigations concerning
  the origins of Greek mythology, (Johann Jakob
  Bachofen, Walter F. Otto).

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Born of modern religious studies and comparative
religions. Eliade

• Today religious studies is practiced by
  scholars worldwide. In its early years, it was
  known as Comparative Religions or the Science of
  Religion and, in the USA, there are those who
  today also know the field as the History of
  religion (associated with methodological
  traditions traced to the University of Chicago in
  general, and in particular Mircea Eliade, from
  the late 1950s through to the late 1980s).
  (Source Wikipedia).
• Eliade is maybe the most important figure in
  founding the basics of modern religious studies
  and comparative religions. Eliade compared in
  both synchronic and diachronic manner over
  several dozens of different religious forms in
  order to find the most essential features of
  religion as such. He investigated primitive,
  small, tribal cults, modern and old sects,
  occultist and esoteric movements, major
  world-religions and minor, local religions, as
  well as embranchments of these major and minor
  religions, that is to say heretic movements also.

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Most important subdisciplines of religious studies

• Science of Religion or Religious Studies is an
  inter-disciplinary study of religious phenomena.
  It contains several subdisciplines, that could be
  pursued on their own right.
• Literary approaches (religion in literature) are
  also valuable and important sources to understand
  religious phenomena.
• Texts and documents of theological and historical
  self-understanding and self-interpretation of
  religious communities and people are also
  necessary sources.
• Major subdisciplines are 1. cultural
  anthropology of religion, 2. economics of
  religion, 3. sociology of religion, 4. psychology
  of religion, 6. geography of religion, 7.
  philology of religious texts, 8. comparative
  religions, 9. philosphy of religions.

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Anthropology and cultural anthropology of religion

• Anthropology of religion is principally concerned
  with the common basic needs of man that religion
  fulfills. Modern anthropology assumes that every
  religion is created by the human community that
  worships it, a methodological approach that is
  called the projection idea. (Cf. Stewart Eliott
  Guthrie, 2000 225, ff.).
• Cultural anthropology of religion is principally
  concerned with the cultural aspects of religion.
  Of primary concern to the cultural anthropologist
  of religions are rituals, beliefs, religious art,
  and practices of piety. Main figures Fraser,
  Tylor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz.

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Economics of religion

• Economics of religion researches the economic
  attitudes and behaviour of religious groups. It
  has been observed that there is a strong
  relationship between economics and religion.
• Max Weber (1864-1920) was the first who devoted
  closer investigations to the interrelation of
  religion and economics. One of his main concerns
  was the economic behaviour of religious people
  and religious communities.
• Weber had the idea in mind that the protestant
  ethics served as an ideological engine to the
  evolvement and spread of modern Western
  capitalism, (The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit
  of Capitalism, Economic Ethics of the World
  Religions)

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Sociology of religion

• The sociology of religion concerns the
  dialectical relationship between religion and
  society the practices, historical backgrounds,
  developments, universal themes and roles of
  religion in society. There is particular emphasis
  on the recurring role of religion in all
  societies and throughout recorded history.
• Sociology of religion began with the
  investigations of Émile Durkheim about the
  suicide rates in protestant and catholic
  communities (1897), and Max Webers comparative
  analyses concerning economic behavior in
  different religious communities.

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Psychology of religion

• The psychology of religion is concerned with
  what psycho-logical principles are operative in
  religious communities and practitioners. William
  James was one of the first academics to bridge
  the gap between the emerging science of
  psychology and the study of religion. A few
  issues of concern to the psychologist of
  religions are the psychological nature of
  religious conversion, the making of religious
  decisions, religion and happiness, and the
  psychological factors in evaluating religious
  claims.
• The founding fathers of modern psychological
  approaches of religion were Sigmund Freud and
  Carl Gustav Jung. Freud put an emphasis on the
  instinctive, biological roots of religions, he
  highlighted the role of drives in religious
  behavior. Jung emphasized the cultural character
  of religions, he interpreted the origin and
  functioning of religions with his conception of
  collective unconsciousness.

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The birth of comparative religions. Mircea Eliade

• Comparative religions was founded by Mircea
  Eliade. It investigates on the one hand the
  particular history of a religion, and also its
  cultural, historical, social, etc. embedment, and
  on the other hand tries to fix the common and
  different features of religions. It is a central
  discipline for the whole of religious studies.
• According to Eliade there were some basic
  structures in religious experience which could be
  found in every known forms of religion.
• Such structures are for example. 1. the
  differentiation of sacred and profane 2. the
  experience of Eternal Return (that religious
  man during religious fests re-lives mythical
  events again and again), 3. Coincidentia
  oppositorum, the inner connection of fundamental
  oppositions. Yahweh is both kind and wrathful
  the God of the Christian mystics and theologians
  is terrible and gentle at once

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Neurological approaches

• Neurological approaches Recently there has been
  an interesting meeting between neurology and
  religion, especially Buddhism. Also of interest
  has been the temporal lobe, the "God center" of
  the brain. (Ramachandran, ch. 9) Although not a
  widely accepted discipline within religious
  studies, neurological findings in regard to
  religious experience may very well become of more
  widespread interest to scholars of religion.
  Scientific investigators have used a
  SPECT-scanner to analyze the brain activity of
  both Christian contemplatives and Buddhist
  meditators, finding them to be quite similar,
  (Source Wikipedia).