History of the Science of World Religions

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History of the Science of World Religions
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• A. Religionfrom Latin religio
• 1. Originally seems to referred to as fear
  or reverence for the godslater to the rites
  offered to them
• 2. Confusion as to where word originates
• a. relegere--to gather things together or
  to pass over things repeatedly
• b. religare--to bind things
  togetheremphasize communal aspectdraws people
  into religious rites, practice and belief

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• A. The study of religions seemingly originated
  with the Greeks
• 1. Herodotusfather of historytook seriously
  the chronology of the past
• 2. Epicurusa radical critic of religion and
  sought to catalog and explain the sense of the
  sacred
• 3. Stoicsbelieved there was a common
  denominator of sacred behind all religion

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• B. Romans studied religion
• 1. Ciceroconcerned with the word religion and
  was first to use the term
• 2. Seneca, Tacitus, and Julius Caesar all
  interested in the study
• 3. After Christianity emerged study of different
  religions was neglected since the church was more
  concerned with its own mission and survival

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• C. Confrontation with Islam
• 1. Islam rapid expansion
• 2. Crusades

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• D. The Modern Mission Movement
• With William Carey in 1792

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• E. The New Empiricism and Rationalism
• 1. Deists and philosophers such as Hume,
  Rousseau, and Voltaire discussed the problem of
  natural religion
• 2. Max Mueller wrote an essay on comparative
  mythologyhe found the origin of myths in natural
  phenomena

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Criteria for the Study of World Religions
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• A. Objectivitystudents of religion must observe
  facts as objectively as possible
• 1. One must consider sacred texts and historical
  manifestations of the faith
• 2. It is important not to pre-judge another
  religious perspective

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• B. A Thorough Grounding
• 1. Must have knowledge of history, psychology,
  philosophy, sociology, and theology in order to
  come to the essence of different religions
• 2. Such facts are necessary for intelligent
  comparisons and discussions

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• C. Proper Criteria
• One must have the responsibility to establish a
  criteria for judgment based on fact, not value
  judgments

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• Distinguishing between fact and value
• 1. A factual judgment asserts that is or is so
• 2. A value judgment asserts that something ought
  to be

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The Study of Religion
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• A. Animism
• Edward Tylorfounder of modern anthropology
• A type of consciousness in animate and inanimate
  objects

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• Fear
• Rabbi Brown
• Anicent humanity was insecure because of the
  forces of nature
• Suggested Gen. 11 should have read
• in the beginning was fear
• Lucretius offered this as explanation of origin
  of religion
• We fear what we do not know

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• TotemismDurkheim
• Worship of ancestors
• Religion arose out of fear for loved ones
• Tribe was the family enlarged
• Religion is identified with society

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• D. High God RevelationWilhelm Schmidt
• Rooted against evolution view of religion
• Believed most ancient people had a belief in a
  higher being

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Definitions of Religion
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• A. Religion as a phenomenon looked on as
  universalEliades concept of the
• sense of the sacred

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• B. Anti-Rationalistic Definitions
• 1. Lucretiusan anti-rational, coercive force
• 2. Reinancha sum of scruples which impede the
  free exercise of our faculties
• 3. Marxa pathological manifestation of
  protective forces, deviation caused by ignorance
  of natural causes and their effects

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• C. Intellectual Definition
• Max Mueller wrote that religion is a mental
  factor independent of sense and reason to
  apprehend the infinite in different names

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• D. Emotional Definitions
• 1. Schleiermacher saw the essence of religion as
  an emotion and consists of feelings of absolute
  dependence
• 2. McTaggert said religion is best described as
  an emotion resting in conviction of harmony
  between ourselves and the universe at large

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• E. Religion as Morality
• Immanuel Kant saw religion as the recognitions of
  our duties as divine commands, the driving force
  of the sacred is morality, e.g., tabu, holiness

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• F. Psychological Definition
• William James said that religion comes from the
  feelings and experiences and individual people

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• G. Religion as Ultimate ValuationPaul Tillichs
  ultimate concern
• 1. Ultimate concern has priority in the system
  of concerns which constitutes a personality or a
  cultureit gives meaning and purpose to human
  life
• 2. Ultimate concern is pervasivespread over the
  totality of existence
• 3. Ultimate concern is concerned with the
  holyRudolph Otto saw holiness as a special and
  unique experience. He coined the phrase
  numinous, from Latin meaning divinity, god, or
  spiritrefers to a special feeling of aweness or
  fear
• 4. Ultimate concern has to do with the
  expression and communication of religious
  experiencereligious experience takes place
  through symbolic words, objects, and actions
• 5. Ultimate Concern is both lived and
  celebrated---celebrated through liturgy and
  mythologylived out in the religious expressions
  influencing all factors of life

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Three Types of Religious Experience
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• A. Cosmic Religionone in which there is found a
  plurality of religious objects or gods it is
  polytheistic. The many gods are associated with
  nature and/or culture. Prehistoric and folk
  religions are examples of this type

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• B. Acosmic Religionone in which is found the
  religious object beyond the common secular world
  of nature and societyusually emphasizes the One.
• Hinduism and transcendental monism are examples

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• C. Historical Religionone in which is found the
  religious object beyond and within the common
  worldsees history as linearexamples are
  Judaism, Christanity, and Islam

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Religion of Pre-Historic Humanity
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• A. Concept of religion is believed to have
  began in the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic) with
  the Neanderthals (100,000-25,000 years ago)
• 1. Deliberate and meticulous care of burying
  dead, with ceremony
• 2. The dead were buried in a fetal
  positiona return to the womb

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• 3. Example of burial in Monte Cicero (Italy)
• a. Bones of deer, horse, hyena, elephant, and
  lion were on the floor and heaped up around the
  walls in piles
• b. On the floor beneath the cranaium were two
  fractured metacarpals of an ox and of a deer
• c. The skull showed signs of having received
  a fatal blow on the right side of the temple

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• d. At its base the portion connecting the
  braid with the spinal cord had been cut away
  after death, probably to extract the brain
• e. The site appeared be a place in which the
  body was deposited ceremonially in a cave used
  for ritual purposes as a sacred ossuary

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• 4. Another example of a ritual burial is in
  Bavaria
• a. A nest of 27 human skulls were found in a
  group embedded in red ochre, the skulls looking
  westward
• b. A few yards away was a second identical
  group of six skullssome of these the cervical
  vertebrae were still attached and from their
  condition the heads must have been severed from
  the body after death with flint knives

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c. Those skulls in the center were tightly
packed together and crushedit seems that they
had been added one by one from time to time d.
Twenty of the skulls were of children ornamented
with snail shells nine were of women with
necklaces of deer teeth, and four were of adult
males
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Cro-Magnons (25,000-10,000 years ago)more
developed1. First idols found were of female
deitiesshows interest in fertility the concept
of the mother goddess beginning to appear as a
fecundity motif

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• 2. From drawings, it appears the concept of
  symphatic magic was being conceived3.
  Throughout other burial sites, certain shells
  (cowrie) were shaped in the form of a portal
  through which a child enters the world4. During
  this time there was a widespread custom of
  placing ochreous powder on the body red was the
  color of life and placing the red ochre on the
  body suggests a belief in a life to come

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• 5. One anthropologist believes the painting of
  the body with the red ochre was the first
  mummification and an attempt to make the body
  servicable again
• 6. Some burial spots could suggest that the
  living were making offerings to the dead out of a
  fear and awe of them

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• C. Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age,
  10,000-7,000 years ago
• 1. This age was a transitional age which saw
  the vanishing of the ice sheet and a gradual
  shift from nomadic to village life
• 2. In one grave site in Brittany were found a
  great ossuary with ten burial sites, including
  the remains of 23 individuals.
• a. The bodies were crouched in shallow
  trench caves near the hearths accompanied by
  implements, perforated shell necklaces, and
  braclets
• b. The bodies were covered with red ochre
  and stone slabs
• c. It appeared that the bodies were clothed
  where they were interred

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• 3. In Denmark there was a continuation of
  extended burial in earth graves defined by a
  small ring of small stones around the body and
  covered with a large earth mound known as
  dyssers or dolmans

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• D. The Neolithic (New Stone Age, 7000-3000
  years ago
• 1. This age is characterized by several great
  changes
• a. Early forms of agriculture, with active
  tilling of the soil
• b. Domestication of animals and their
  gathering into flocks and herds
• c. Advances in the arts of pottery, plaiting,
  weaving, and sewing
• d. Establishment of settled communities with
  an accompanying growth of population
• e. The invention of the wheeled card
• f. The first surgery

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• 2. Religion also being radically transformed
• a. The Mother Goddess or Great Goddess of
  earlier hunting culture became associated
  with creation and regeneration
• b. Female divine power went beyond the
  animal models of birthing and nurture to the
  watering, tending, and protecting of the
  whole world of vegetation
• c. Studies of Old Europe (Balkans) reveal a
  pantheon of mostly female deities
  subsequently obscured, but not fully
  displaced by later Indo-Aryan patriarchal and
  gender-polarized views.

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Generalizations of Tribal Religions

• A. Traditionalno written language exists
• B. Naturalistic framework of referencebiologica
  l drives
• C. Spontaneousresponse to stimuli, irrational

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Broad Generalizations

• A. Primitive religion is monisticno dualism
• B. A sense of absolute interdependence of all
  things
• C. Interdependence maintained by infallible
  rigid authority
• D. Religion serves to maintain social harmony
  and stability
• E. No opposites among tribal peopleeverything
  and everybody complementary

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Characteristics of Religion in Primal Cultures
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• A. Awe before the Sacred
• 1. Rudolf Otto in The Ideal of the Holy, bases
  the experience of the holy upon an encounter
  with a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, and
  found it in all religionsthe degree of the
  sense of the awe or holy various tremendously
  with each group
• 2. In most primitive societies the sacred
  possesses a special significance and cannot be
  handled lightly
• 3. Objects and persons can have this awe
  within them

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• B. Expressions of anxiety in ritual
• 1. When there is a sense of the sacred,
  anxiety occurs and will cause action
• 2. This action takes the form of special
  deeds and words
• 3. Such anxiety is the basis of all religious
  ritual

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• C. Ritual and Expectancy
• 1. Some rituals are expectant in nature
• 2. They presuppose a causal efficacy
• 3. They are performed to bring health,
  offspring, productivity of the soil, fertility
  of cattle, et al
• 4. Other rites occur at specific times for
  specific purposes
• a. Rites of passageconnected with birth,
  name giving, initiation, betrothal, marriage,
  death, etc
• b. The elevation to tribal leadership or
  kingship

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• D. Myth and Ritual
• 1. The making of myth is common in all human
  cultures
• 2. Myths help to answer questions as to the
  origin of actions or beliefs
• 3. Cosmogonic or creation myths help to
  explain the origin of existence
• 4. An etiological myth is one that explains
  how things have come to be as they are now
• 5. The quasi-historical myth is the
  elaboration of an original happening, usually
  involving a hero or pioneer figure

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• E. Types of magic
• 1. Magic may be loosely defined as an endeavor
  through utterance of set words, or the
  performance of set acts, or both, to control or
  bend the powers of the world to ones will
• 2. Sympathetic magic (James Frazer) takes an
  imitative form based upon analogy
• a. It assumes that look-alikes act alike, or,
  more significantly, that like influences or
  even produces like
• b. Thus, if one imitates the looks and
  actions of a person or an animal (or even a
  thundercloud), one can induce a like and
  desired action in the imitated being or object

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• 3. Outcomes of magic are considered to be
• a. ProductiveCro-Magnon hunting magic
  (painting) was a type of imitative magic
• b. Aversiveone can use magic to hurt ones
  enemies by imitating a harmful act upon an
  image of a person
• c. Contagiousthings conjoined and then
  separated still are connectedthus severed
  hair or fingernails retain a magical sympathy
  with the person to whom they belong

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• 4. Methods of control of magic
• a. Fetishismrefers to any resort to a
  presumed power in inanimate objects includes
  objects which have power innate in them
• b. Shamanismrefers to the conjuring of
  spirits into or out of human beings by one
  who is similarly spirit-possessed

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• F. Prayer
• 1. Prayers in preliterate societies are
  generally formal and structured
• 2. Where the gods are anthropormorphic, formal
  prayers generally include elements found in more
  literate societies namely, adoration,
  confession of wrongdoing, and promise of
  atonement, thanksgiving in grateful recognition
  of past favors, and supplication or petitions of
  a more or less specific kind

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• G. Divination
• 1. A means to by-pass prayer
• 2. It aims at immediate knowledge of the
  intentions or dispositions of the spiritual
  powers
• 3. Usually there is a connection between
  divination and shamanism

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• H. Belief in Mana (Used by Codrington)
• 1. Mana is a Melanesian term widely used to
  designate a widespread, although not universal,
  belief in occult force of indwelling
  supernatural power distinct from spirits
• 2. The term refers to an experienced presence
  of a powerful but silent force

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• I. Animism
• 1. An acceptance that all sorts of motionless
  objects as well as living and moving creatures
  have souls or spirits in them
• 2. Identified with E. B. Tylor, who wrote that
  all nature is possessed, pervaded, crowded with
  spiritual beings

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• J. Veneration and worship of powers
• 1. Worship can take three modes
• a. Sometimes an object itself is worshipped
  as living and active, heavily charged with
  mana
• b. Sometimes the object is nor worshipped
  for itself, but for the spirit or soul lodged
  in it
• c. Sometimes the object is a symbol of the
  reality which is worshipped
• 2. Veneration and awe are short of worship

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• K. Recognition of a Supreme Being
• 1. Great debate as to whether primal peoples
  had a belief in a supreme being
• 2. It is rather common to find a belief in a
  deity up in the sky or at a great distance from
  the earth
• 3. Daily activities did not include such a
  high deity
• 4. The great deity usually was the creator of
  the more popular deities

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• L. Taboo-Tabu
• 1. Taboos are prohibitions applied to things,
  persons, and actions because they are considered
  sacred, dangerous, or socially forbidden
• 2. Many taboos are due to fear based on mana
  others may reflect the dread of pollution

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• M. Purification rites
• 1. Ceremonies of purification and cleansing
  are due to the belief of taboos or the impurity
  of a certain person or object
• 2. In some cases, purification rites are used
  for the motive of purifying oneself for future
  ritual
• 3. Purification rites may take the form of
  fasting, abstention from sex, ablutions, et al

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• N. Sacrifices and gifts
• 1. Sacrifice usually entails the giving up or
  destruction (e.g., burning) of something,
  animate or inanimate, human, animal, or
  vegetable in order to cause it to pass from
  human possession to that of the divine
• 2. Original sacrifices seem to have involved
  animal and/or human sacrifices, because the
  spirits as well as humans need the vitality and
  strength present in life and blood
• 3. Sacrifice may be performed to seek
  reconciliation with a divinity
• 4. Sacrifice may be performed to placate the
  gods thus considered to be propitiatory

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• O. Attitudes toward the dead
• 1. In many ancient societies, there developed
  a view that the dead may cause injury to the
  living
• 2. Thus, some kind of actions or words may be
  performed to prevent such interference

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• P. Totemism
• 1. A very common characteristic of primal
  religions recognize the existence of a more or
  less intimate relationship between certain human
  groups or particular individuals and classes or
  species of animals, plant, or inanimate object
  in nature
• 2. This recognition results in special social
  grouping and special rituals unique to that
  social grouping
• 3. If an animal is the totem, the group is
  forbidden to eat the animal except in special
  cases
• 4. By eating the animal, the group takes on
  the power of that particular animal

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African Religion
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• I. No way to really discuss as one category
  since differences are so greatwe can look at a
  few recurring themes
• A. Transcendence
• 1. Names and expressions of divinities
  vary greatly
• 2. But there does seem to be a general
  belief that there exists a kind of a supreme
  being who has control over the lesser spirits

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• 3. The first observations that African
  religion was simply forms of primitive
  polytheism does not seem to bear out
• 4. The supreme being is described in
  various waysas a beneficent being, a father or
  mother, or as a holy god
• 5. Popular religion seems to be
  polytheistic these beings seem to be
  representatives or servants of the higher god

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• 6. Like most religions, there are creation
  stories

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• B. Stages on Lifes wayones life is
  dominated by ritualsrites of passage
• 1.Birthchildren are important naming
  ceremonies is important ceremony, accomplished
  in a variety of ways
• 2. Initiationthe coming of age, assumption
  of responsibilities of adulthood

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• 3. Marriagevery important and intricate
• 4. Deathserious and somewhat fearful
  experience there is general belief in a life
  after death reincarnation believed by some

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C. Religious roles 1. Includes prophets,
shamans, sacred kings, traditional medicine
men 2. They have means of foreseeing
the future 3. Oracles are important 4. The
priest is important uses established ritual
forms which relate human life to transcendent
life 5. King is important feature

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Native American Religion
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• A. Like African religions, there is great
  variety
• 1. Differences between gatherers and farmers
• 2. The latter celebrate the cycle of the
  agricultural year
• 3. Many hunter-gatherers have stories of a
  transformer of trickster who set things in
  motion
• 4. For farmers the creator is not a person,
  but a power in the sky

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• B. Recurring Themes
• 1. Transcendence
• a. There exists in all persons and objects
  a mystifying spiritcalled mana by Melanesians
• b. Many do not have concept of a single
  high god

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• c. Paul Radin notes two aspects of this
  high god
• (a) the supreme deity is just and rational
  but remote
• (b) the transformer who is not always
  fair, but actively intervene in human life
  there also exists great number of other
  spiritsgood and bad

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• C. Stages on Lifes way
• 1. Birthnaming ceremony is extremely
  important
• 2. Initiation
• a. A vision quest for boys and sometimes
  for girls
• b. Usually accomplished by sending them
  into wilderness, usually sees a
  supernatural visitor, that becomes major
  divinity of the person

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• 3. Marriageintricateno single patternmany
  see in women a mysterious power
• 4. Deathusually takes on form of fear and
  avoidancecontact with corpse leads to
  separation or isolation

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• D. Religious rolesemphasis on shaman, medicine
  man and priestpriests lead in established
  rituals, no vision necessary