History of World Religions

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History of World Religions
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Wisdom

• Philosophy literally means the love of wisdom.

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Perspective

• Religion can be seen as a multiple layered series
  of teachings and practices that can be seen in a
  number of different ways.

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Integral Approach

• A key component of this course is the
  developmental and evolutionary model of religion
  as the guiding principle.

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A Developmental Model

• A developmental model of religion means that
  religion means different things to people who are
  at different levels of development.

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Three Basic Levels

• Three basic levels we will work with are the
  pre-rational, rational, and trans-rational
  levels.

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Trans-rational Development

• In order to develop to the trans-rational levels,
  people have to make a choice to do so.

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Emotional Responses

• A good thing to keep in mind in this class is to
  ask yourself what is going on if you are having
  an emotional response to a certain idea.

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Defining Religion

• Traditional religion in innumerable different
  cultures affirms that human life has
  relationships and objectives beyond the ordinary,
  basic, physical and emotional needs of individual
  people

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A Sense of Wonder

• Abraham Joshua Heschel described religion as a
  sense of wonder. It is that sense of awe and
  radical amazement we can often feel at a display
  of nature, the birth of a child, etc.

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Religious Experience

• Religious belief often springs from mystical
  experience-the overwhelming awareness that one
  has been touched by a reality that far transcends
  ordinary life.

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Why Study?

• If there is to be peace among the nations,
  cultures, and religions of the world, religious
  differences must be known and respected.

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Conditioned Reality

• To say something is conditioned simply means it
  is limited or restricted.

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Unconditioned Reality

• Its knowledge, wisdom, and mental power would be
  unlimited and would embrace all that could
  possibly be known or thought.

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Unconditioned Reality

• Brahman (Hinduism)
• Nirvana (Buddhism)
• Toa (Taoism)
• Heaven (Confucianism)
• God (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)
• Animism (Shamanism)

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Conditioned Reality

• Maya (Hinduism)
• Samsara (Buddhism)
• Under Heaven (Taoism, Confucianism)
• Death (Judaism)
• The World (Christianity)

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Religious Expression

• The first level of religious expression, the
  theoretical, embraces essentially the verbal
  expression what is said.

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Mythology

• Mythology is a story that reveals truth. In that
  sense religious myths can be very true in terms
  of the wisdom revealed while untrue in a literal
  sense.

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Practical Expression

• The practices of religion constitute the form of
  religious expression referred to as the practical
  expression of religion what is done.

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Sociological Expression

• Forms of organization, and the way they relate
  to the broader social context, are also part of
  religion, the sociological expression of
  religion.

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The Descriptive Approach

• It is not the purpose of a study such as this to
  decide on the ultimate truth or falsity of any
  religion. We are simply trying to know and
  understand them better.

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The Critical Approach

• Beneficial change will not occur unless
  questions are asked and criticisms made. But fair
  and effective change also requires the most
  accurate information and insight that can be
  garnered.

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The Evolutionary Model

• All the founders of the worlds major religions
  came around the same time.

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Hunting and Gathering

• Spiritual power was focused in the sky, the
  world of animals, and the ecstatic individual.

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Agricultural Religion

• The development of agriculture is generally
  viewed as a great landmark in religion, as it is
  in economic history.

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Ancient Empires

• Polytheism reached an apex during this period,
  for it was really a result of the union of a
  number of tribes into a single society.

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Religion Response to History

• Epics gave a narrative story to a people that
  made sense of their history and usually showed
  that there was a higher purpose to where they
  were going as a society.

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Ritual

• Another response is to keep certain rites
  unchanged as a sort of a frozen perpetuation of
  the past before the discovery of history and as a
  symbolic area of experience untouched by it.

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The Religious Founders

• By making the life of a single individual the
  pivot of history, they acknowledge its
  irreversible movement and at the same time give
  it a sharply focused central axis.

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Wisdom

• Wisdom is the part of religion that focuses not
  so much on theory or dogma, but on certain
  practices and disciplines which allow a person to
  undergo a transformation.

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Devotion

• Devotional sects placed more emphasis on their
  feelings than their intellect, love than on faith.

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Modernism

• Modernism was a new exaltation of the secular
  world and the individual in it.

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Liberalism

• Liberalism in religion is essentially the
  restatement of religious absolutes so as to fit
  with the normative social and scientific values
  of the cultural context.

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Current Problems

• Modernism created many problems such as the
  ecological crisis, nuclear war, materialism, and
  many modern medical problems caused by stress and
  addictions.

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Postmodernism

• Postmodernism can be summed up by the one word
  skepticism.

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Skepticism

• Postmodernism is controversial because it
  challenges all of the assumptions of modernism,
  not least of which is that there can be certainty
  in religious faith.

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Integral Philosophy

• Instead of saying something is stupid, it will
  instead ask, What is right about it?

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Women in Religion

• The role of women in religion needs special
  attention because it has been ignored in a
  significant way into recently.

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Context

• Remember that a trans-rational teaching can be
  limited by the pre-rational consciousness of the
  people following the leader.

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Shedding Light

• Just to shed light on the subject is to call it
  into question.

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Terminology

• Approached by different ways of knowing, by
  different people, from different times and
  different cultures, the sacred has many faces.

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WordsUltimate Reality

• Immanent Present in the world
• Transcendent Existing above and outside of the
  material universe.
• Theistic Religions based on ones relationship
  to a divine Being.
• Monotheistic When the Being is worshipped as a
  singular form

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WordsUltimate Reality

• If many attributes and forms of the Divine are
  emphasized, the religion may be labeled
  polytheistic. Religions that hold that beneath
  the multiplicity of apparent forms there is one
  underlying substance are called monistic.

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WordsUltimate Reality

• Atheism is the non-belief in any deity.
• Agnosticism is not the denial of the divine but
  the feeling, I dont know whether it exists or
  not, or the belief that if it exists it is
  impossible for humans to know it.

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WordsUltimate Reality

• Nontheism Ultimate reality may also be
  conceived in nontheistic terms. It may be
  experienced as a changeless Unity, as
  Suchness, or simply as the Way. There may be
  no sense of a personal Creator God in such
  understandings.

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Mystical Insight

• The only form of comprehension of God we can
  have is to realize how futile it is to try to
  comprehend him.

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More Terminology

• Myths are stories based on symbols.
• Cosmogony Sacred accounts of the creation of
  the world.
• Eschatology Beliefs concerning the purported
  end of the world.

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More Terminology

• Fundamentalism The selective insistence on
  parts of a religious tradition and to violence
  against people of other religions.

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More Terminology

• Liberalism Liberals take a more flexible
  approach to religious tradition.
• Heretics Those who publicly assert
  controversial positions that are unacceptable to
  the orthodox establishment.
• Mystics Those governed by their own spiritual
  experiences.

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Perspective, Perspective

• It is true that religions have done, and continue
  to do, horrible things. But they have also done
  wonderful and glorious things.