Meningsfull känslomässig religion
The likes of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris argue that rational beings following the evidence must inevitably conclude that religion is harmful. In short, the concept is today used for a genus of social formations that includes several members, a type of which there are many tokens. The concept religion did not originally refer to a social genus, however. Its earliest references were not to social kinds and, over time, the extension of the concept has evolved in different directions, to the point that it threatens incoherence.
As Paul Griffiths notes, listening to the discussions about the concept religion. These difficulties are apparent, too, in the academic study of religion, and they go far toward an explanation of why the discipline has no coherent or widely shared understanding of its central topic. First, the disparate variety of practices now said to fall within this category raises a question of whether one can understand this social taxon in terms of necessary and sufficient properties or whether instead one should instead treat it as a family resemblance concept.
Here, the question is whether the concept religion can be said to have an essence. Second, the recognition that the concept has shifted its meanings, that it arose at a particular time and place but was unknown elsewhere, and that it has so often been used to denigrate certain cultures, raises the question whether the concept corresponds to any kind of entity in the world at all or whether, instead, it is simply a rhetorical device that should be retired.
This entry therefore considers the rise of critical and skeptical analyses of the concept, including those that argue that the term refers to nothing. The concept religion did not originally refer to a social genus or cultural type. In western antiquity, and likely in many or most cultures, there was a recognition that some people worshipped different gods with commitments that were incompatible with each other and that these people constituted social groups that could be rivals.
In the Middle Ages, as Christians developed monastic orders in which one took vows to live under a specific rule, they called such an order religio and religiones for the plural , though the term continued to be used, as it had been in antiquity, in adjective form to describe those who were devout and in noun form to refer to worship Biller ; Nongbri ch. The most significant shift in the history of the concept is when people began to use religion as a genus of which Christian and non-Christian groups were species.
One sees a clear example of this use in the writings of Edward Herbert — As the post-Reformation Christian community fractured into literal warring camps, Herbert sought to remind the different protesting groups of what they nevertheless had in common. Ignoring rituals and group membership, this proposal takes an idealized Protestant monotheism as the model of religion as such. Herbert was aware of peoples who worshipped something other than a single supreme deity.
He noted that ancient Egyptians, for instance, worshipped multiple gods and people in other cultures worshipped celestial bodies or forces in nature. Herbert might have argued that, lacking a belief in a supreme deity, these practices were not religions at all but belonged instead in some other category such as superstition, heresy, or magic. The concept religion understood as a social genus was increasingly put to use by to European Christians as they sought to categorize the variety of cultures they encountered as their empires moved into the Americas, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
In this context, fed by reports from missionaries and colonial administrators, the extension of the generic concept was expanded. The most influential example is that of anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor — who had a scholarly interest in pre-Columbian Mexico. This generic definition included the forms of life predicated on belief in a supreme deity that Herbert had classified as religion. In the twentieth century, one sees a third and last growth spurt in the extension of the concept.
One sees this shift in the work of William James, for example, when he writes,. Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
The Concept of Religion
Proudfoot This expansion also includes Theravada Buddhism because dependent co-origination pratītyasamutpāda is a conception of the general order of existence and it includes Zen Buddhism because Buddha-nature is said to pervade everything. Southwold Given the near-automatic way that Buddhism is taken as a religion today, the cosmic version now seems to be the dominant one. Some scholars resist this third expansion of the concept and retain a Tylorean definition, and it is true that there is a marked difference between practices that do and practices that do not involve interacting with person-like beings.
In the former, anthropomorphic cases, practitioners can ask for help, make offerings, and pray with an understanding that they are heard. This difference raises a philosophical question: on what grounds can one place the practices based on these two kinds of realities in the same category? If that term works, then religions in all three concentric circles can be understood as sets of practices predicated on belief in the supernatural.
Is religion good or bad for humanity? Epic analysis delivers
Many cultures lack or reject a distinction between natural and supernatural Saler , Wouter Hanegraaff , following J. One sees a functional approach in Emile Durkheim , who defines religion as whatever system of practices unite a number of people into a single moral community whether or not those practices involve belief in any unusual realities. Substantive and functional approaches can produce non-overlapping extensions for the concept.
Famously, a functional approach can hold that even atheistic forms of capitalism, nationalism, and Marxism function as religions. The literature on these secular institutions as functionally religions is massive. As Trevor Ling says,.
On capitalism as a religion, see, e. One functionalist might count white supremacy as a religion Weed ; Finley et al. Without a supernatural, transcendent, or superempirical element, these phenomena would not count as religious for Herbert, Tylor, James, or Geertz. Conversely, interactions with supernatural beings may be categorized on a functional approach as something other than religion.