INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WHAT IS RELIGION? SOME THEORIES ON THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF RELIGION AND THE EARLIEST FORMS OF RELIGION MAJOR PERIODS OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE

DEFINING RELIGION Substantive – Rites and practices related to a belief in spiritual beings. – Ultimate reality; Sense of the Holy Other Functional – A unified system of beliefs and practices which unite into one community all those who adhere to them. Combination – Religion is a structure of discourses and practices (beliefs and rites) common to a social group that refer to a force or forces that the believers consider superior to their natural or social surroundings and in whose regard people express a sense of dependence and feel obligated to a particular pattern of conduct in Society.

ORIGINS OF RELIGION Personal – Emotional Becker – release of stress related to death. – Relieves Anxiety and Fear – Provides hope confidence – It creates an Identity. – Intellectual Tyler – animism based on dreams. Spencer – naturism based on natural forces. Social – Society Totemic – representation of power and clan. – Social Alienation Feuerbach – The divine is symbolic representation of unfulfilled aspirations. Marx – Alienation results from production.

MAJOR HISTORICAL PERIODS Pre-Axial – Self is submerged in family and tribe – Membership is what is important – Social life is one unified whole. Religion is not distinct from other aspects. (No word for religion) – Perceive the world as alive with powers and invisible beings Axial Age – Urbanization and Violence – Emergence of the importance of the individual self Questions of identity Need for a new searching for fulfillment or immortality Growing consciousness of separation between Sacred and Temporal Eventual growth of Sacred within oneself – Need for new moral and legal codes Ethical Component against egotism: expressed in greed, selfishness, fear and despair Universal component – Benevolence for All not just one’s own people

Modernity – Laws of natural and social world reside within nature and social world themselves – Laws are knowable by human reason – Knowledge exists in distinct categories that are causally related in unilinear and hierarchical fashion – Humanity has potential of self-perfectibility Postmodernity – Historical consciousness – Social construction of reality – Natural and social worlds marked by complexity, randomness and uncertainty Religious Reactions to Change – Romantic Conservatives – Adaptors – Critical Agency