UNDERSTANDING RELIGION

First Encounter

WHAT IS RELIGION?

Some Key Characteristics

Belief system: Sacredness, Ultimate Reality, transcendence/immanence

Community: an organized group of religious people who think alike and share the same stories and practices

Stories: Religious “myths”. These are not inherently false; myth is a technical term that refers to certain sacred stories that religious groups tell about themselves and their worldview.

Practice: religious rituals, ethical behavior, religious experience, and moral values all fall under the larger category of “practice”.

Aesthetics: material expressions of religion like art, music, and architecture.

SACREDNESS

All religions are concerned with understanding, uncovering, experiencing, and explaining the deepest level of reality. What is “really real”? How do we know this is it?

The most common way to refer to this Ultimate Reality in America is by using the proper noun, “God.” This is an old English word that first appears in medieval translations of the Latin Bible.

“God” is used by English speaking scholars today to refer to Ultimate Reality in many different religious systems, even when their understanding of Ultimate Reality differs greatly from what Christians believe.

THEISM, ATHEISM & NON-THEISM

Theism: Scholars call the belief in one, ultimate sacred reality, or “one God” monotheism to distinguish it from other ideas about Ultimate Reality. Some religions conceive of Ultimate Reality as having many forms or manifestations. This kind of belief system has been labeled polytheism: the belief in or worship of more than “one God”.

Atheism (Gk: atheos without God/s) is the term scholars use to describe a system of belief (an -ism) that rejects the idea of one or more supernatural beings who are responsible for creating and sustaining the world.

Non-theism is a newer term used to describe a religious system that does not need the idea of one or more gods to make sense of Ultimate Reality. Classical Buddhism and Confucianism are two examples of non-theistic religions.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Religious systems that are centered on God or gods try to answer the question of how human beings should experience or relate to Ultimate Reality.

Sacredness can be explained and experienced as something transcendent—the idea that God/s are not limited by or dependent on the material world for existence. How does a human being experience a reality that lies completely outside of his own world? A wholly transcendent Reality must reveal itself to humans to be known and experienced.

Sacredness can also be understood as an immanent reality. This means that God/s are or become part of the material world so that human beings can encounter sacredness through nature or other this-worldly means. Divine self-revelation is not necessary because people can find this Sacred Reality on their own, if they know what to look for.

Animism is the term scholars of religion use to describe beliefs and practices that presume all of nature is imbued with and animated by sacredness or an ultimate spiritual reality. You could say that animistic religious cultures are naturally “eco-friendly”!

Any experience that a person explains or understands within a religious frame of reference is a religious experience. Religious experience can be categorized in many different ways. There is no single, absolute set of categories that account for all religious experiences. One way of organizing your study is by asking where the person’s experience primarily takes place. Does the experience happen as a normal part of a social gathering; does it take place in a person’s body via the physical senses, or is it mostly experienced in the mind:

Social experiences

Sensory Experiences

Interior Experiences

SOCIAL EXPERIENCESPeople may describe their social interactions with others in a religious environment as “religious experiences”. For example: “I went to church camp,” or, “I sang in the choir,” “or “Our home fellowship group ministered to the homeless.” These are ‘religious’ experiences insomuch as they take place in a social environment for religious purposes. Not all camps, choirs and home groups are religious social experiences. There is nothing essentially religious about this kind of experience. This doesn’t mean you might not have a sensory or interior religious experience singing in the choir, of course.

Often social experiences are sacramental because they revolve around rituals and ceremonies in a communal setting.

SENSORY EXPERIENCE

Religious experiences are sometimes described in terms of how they make a person feel, physically and emotionally. Rudolph Otto argued that there is a uniquely religious experience that he called “numinous.” It is an eerie mixture of fear and fascination that makes your heart pound and your knees weak.. You “shouldn’t go there” but you are drawn to the encounter nevertheless. You “know” that you are in the presence of something uncanny or otherworldly, dangerous even, and yet you cannot resist. Other kinds of sensory religious experiences include visual and auditory hallucinations.

For some, a numinous encounter may be religious, for others, it may just be fantasy, while for scientists, it may only be evidence of a primitive biological response, fight or flight, to perceived danger. Those who claim to have visions and hear voices can be saints in a religious context but mentally ill or frauds when judged by non-believers.

INTERIOR EXPERIENCE

Mystical or ecstatic experiences are primarily perceived inwardly, in the mind and the emotions rather than externally in the senses. Often, though, the senses must be

subdued through various physical techniques so that the mind, freed from the constant influx of external signals, can reach alternate states of consciousness where

these interior experiences can occur. Music, dance, chanting, yoga … these are all physical modalities that can be used to overwhelm the senses and precipitate an interior experience. When an experience

like this takes place in a religious framework, then the experience can be classified as “religious” and can be compared to other religious experiences in different contexts. Is there a single, core experience we can label as mystical Is there a common cause

(external or biological) behind the experience? ? Or, do these experiences vary in different contexts and religious frameworks?

RUDOLF OTTO’S IDEAS

Otto was a German scholar of comparative religion and Lutheran theologian (1869-1937). The core of religion according to Otto is the “numinous” experience. Numen is Otto’s term for referring to God.

A human being who experiences God, experiences the Holy, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a fearful and fascinating mystery), a transcendent force completely outside the human realm. In this encounter, the human soul is awed, humbled, speechless, and made aware of its own unworthiness. In the presence of the Holy the human being senses his Profane state of being.

SIGMUND FREUD’S IDEAS

Freud was an Austrian physician and the forefather of modern psychotherapy (1856-1939). Religion, that is, the Judeo-Christian, monotheistic belief in God, is an illusion.

Freud argued that “God” is a projection of the human mind, born out of a person’s need to feel secure in an unsafe world.

He thought ecstatic experiences were self-produced effects whose true causes lay in the repressed needs and unfulfilled desires of the unconscious mind.

CARL JUNGJung described religion as something that grew out of a person’s need to individuate—to find personal fulfillment. The human psyche, according to Jung,

is naturally religious. Gods, spirits, and other divine beings are healthy projections of the human

mind that can assist in the integrative process.

MODERN THEORIESStructuralism: Early anthropologists looked for some kind of underlying structure in the human mind that could account for the universal phenomenon of religious thinking. This approach to studying religion often involved analyzing the religious myths of so-called ‘primitive cultures’—those societies that had not yet integrated into the economic or technological cultures influenced by the rise of scientific thinking and the philosophies of the European Enlightenment—looking for structural units of thought common to all human beings.

Deconstruction: Some theorists now choose to follow the lead of Jacques Derrida, and like him, they virtually abhor the idea of a general theory of anything, especially religion. Deconstruction is a post-modern way of looking at familiar texts in unfamiliar ways to prove that what we take for granted as absolute truths are, in fact, tenuously constructed because the language that we use to communicate our ideas is inherently ambiguous and unstable.

PATTERNSIf we think like Derrida and the deconstructions, we could come to the conclusion that studying religion, or anything for that matter, is an exercise in futility. However, we can salvage the meaning of our study by concluding that looking at religion in just one way will ultimately skew our understanding. To be fair and to do justice to our subject, we need to look at religion from many different angles and compare our findings.

Let’s call these ways of organizing information about religion “patterns”.

Your textbook chooses the following patterns for organizing its contents: Worldview, Beliefs and Practices, Gender (Malloy, Experiencing the World’s Religions, pp. 13-20). These are only some possibilities. Can you think of others? You may have more ideas at the end of the course!

GOOD QUESTIONS TO ASK OF RELIGIONS WE

STUDY!The nature of sacred reality (God, Ultimate Reality, the Holy, etc.). How does a particular religion understand, experience or explain the Sacred?

The nature of the Universe. How did the world we experience come into being? Who or what is responsible? Is it eternal (cyclical) or having begun, will it finally end (linear)?

What is the purpose of human life? Do people have a unique meaning and destiny, or is human life different only by degree from all other life, wherever it may be found?

How do religious people know Reality? Do they have ancient sacred texts that preserve a divine revelation, or do they look inward in meditation or mystical union to discover what else is out there?

Does a religious group think only their religion is ‘true’ and every other religion is ‘false’, or do they think everyone shares something in what is ultimately true and good?

What does a religion say about male and female; about the different roles for men and women?

Image credit: The Others: Teresa Isasi; FRIGHT OF WAY Kidman sheds light on dark haunts in ''The Others'' <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,170503,00.html>