Religion

Having done some research on the common features of early agrarian cities, I’m interested in finding out why all civilizations adopted some sort of religion and how these religions spread over vast regions. I know that by 1200 BCE, there were developed cities in most parts of the world. Having examined some early writing from the city of Sumer in Mesopotamia, I know that people had already conceived of gods that looked out for them and the welfare of their crops and cities. But the world religions I know of — Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam — were bigger than a single city or even a single region of the world. In fact, these religions have survived for thousands of years, and all of them seem to have developed around the same time. Since people do not appear to have lacked for religious life on a local scale from very early times, why did several large-scale belief systems emerge between 1200 BCE and 700 CE? In fact, why did all the major world religions appear in that era? One possibility is that by about 100 BCE, the population in Afro-Eurasia had climbed to over a million. As a result of increasing commercial and cultural interaction between people across this large area, religions were shared. The new religious systems provided foundations of cultural communication, moral expectation, and personal trust among people who were meeting, sharing ideas, and doing business with one another far beyond their local neighborhoods. The historians J.R. and Wil...

study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of The study of religion emerged as a formal Nature and significance The essence of religion and the context of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions Even a commonly accepted definition of religion has proved difficult to establish, though not for lack of trying. Attempts have been made to find a distinctive ingredient in all religions, such as the numinous, or spiritual, experience, the contrast between the Even if an inventory of kinds of belief and practice could be gathered so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion, some scholars would maintain that the differences between religions are more significant than their similarities. Moreover, in the absence of a tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. Thus, some political Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. The other sense of the subjectivity of religion is properly a matter for Neutrality in the study of religion The attempt simply to describe and not judge religious beliefs and practices is often considered to involve epochē is borrowed from the The term phenomenology refers first to the attempt to describe religious phenomena in a way that brings out the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of the religion under investigation but without either phenomenology also refers to the attempt to devise a typology, or classification, of religious phenomena—religious activiti...

Featured Old Testament The Old Testament is the first section of the Bible, covering the creation of Earth through Noah and the flood, Moses and more, finishing with the Jews being expelled to Babylon. The Bible’s Old Testament is very similar to the Hebrew Bible, which has origins in the ancient religion of Judaism. The exact […] Read more Read more about The Bible Judaism Judaism Beliefs Jewish people believe there’s only one God who has established a covenant—or special agreement—with them. Their God communicates to believers through prophets and rewards good deeds while also punishing evil. Most Jews (with the exception of a few groups) believe that their Messiah hasn’t yet come—but will one day. Jewish people worship in […] Islam Islam Facts Muhammad The prophet Muhammad, sometimes spelled Mohammed or Mohammad, was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in A.D. 570. Muslims believe he was the final prophet sent by God to reveal their faith to mankind. According to Islamic texts and tradition, an angel named Gabriel visited Muhammad in 610. while he was meditating in […] Buddhism Buddhism Beliefs Some key Buddhism beliefs include: Founder of Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism who later became known as “the Buddha,” lived during the 5th century B.C. Gautama was born into a wealthy family as a prince in present-day Nepal. Although he had an easy life, Gautama was moved by suffering in the […]

classification of religions, the attempt to systematize and bring order to a vast range of knowledge about religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. It has been the goal of students of The classification of religions involves: (1) the effort to establish groupings among historical religious Function and significance The many schemes suggested for classifying religious communities and religious phenomena all have one purpose in common: to bring order, system, and intelligibility to the vast range of knowledge about human The difficulty of classifying religions is accounted for by the immensity of religious The endeavour to group religions with common characteristics or to discover types of religions and religious phenomena belongs to the systematizing stage of religious study. According to All real science rests on classification and only in case we cannot succeed in classifying the various Principles of classification The Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Normative Perhaps the most common division of religions—and in many ways the most unsatisfactory—distinguishes true religion from false religion. Such classifications may be discovered in the thought of most major religious groups and are the natural, perhaps inevitable, result of the need to defend particular perspectives against challengers or rivals. Normative classifications, however, have no scientific value, because they are arbitrary and subjective, inasmuch as there ...

Something else (2%) Most Americans consider themselves religious or spiritual in some way, The U.S. has the There have been variant explanations for this rapid secularization, including the loss trust and belief in numerous institutions such as the labor market, the economy, government and politics, marriage, the media, along with churches among younger cohorts, History Ever since its early colonial days when some Protestant The text of the [ citation needed] President John Adams and a unanimous Senate endorsed the Expert researchers and authors have referred to the United States as a "Protestant nation" or "founded on Protestant principles", The modern According to a 2002 survey by the In 1963, 90% of U.S. adults claimed to be Christians while only 2% professed [ citation needed] In 2016, 73.7% identified as Christians while 18.2% claimed no religious affiliation. Freedom of religion Atheist (4%) Inaccuracies of independent polling Independent polling results on religion are generally questionable due to numerous factors: • polls consistently fail to predict political election outcomes, signifying consistent failure to capture the actual views of the population • very low response rates for all polls since the 1990s • biases in wording or topic affect how people respond to polls • polls categorize people based on limited choices • polls often generalize broadly • polls have shallow or superficial choices, which complicate capturing complexity of religious beliefs and prac...

The definition of religion is a controversial and complicated subject in [ failed verification] Others, such as Competing definitions [ ] Scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. There are however two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical. • • Some jurisdictions refuse to classify specific religions as religions, arguing that they are instead Modern western [ ] Religion is a An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the essence of religion. The very attempt to define religion, to find some distinctive or possibly unique essence or set of qualities that distinguish the religious from the remainder of human life, is primarily a Western concern. The attempt is a natural consequence of the Western speculative, intellectualistic, and scientific disposition. It is also the product of the dominant Western religious mode, what is called the Judeo-Christian climate or, more accurately, the theistic inheritance from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The theistic form of belief in this tradition, even when downgraded culturally, is formative of the dichotomous Western view of religion. That is, the basic structure of theism is essentially a distinction between a transcendent deity and all else, between the creator and his creation, between God and man. The anthropologist […] system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivati...

Tylor and Frazer - Religion Is Systematized Animism and Magic E.B. Tylor and James Frazer are two of the earliest researchers to develop theories of the nature of religion. They defined religion as essentially being the belief in spiritual beings, making it systematized animism. The reason religion exists is to help people make sense of events which would otherwise be incomprehensible by relying on unseen, hidden forces. This inadequately addresses the social aspect of religion, though, depicting religion and animism are purely intellectual moves. Sigmund Freud - Religion Is Mass Neurosis According to Sigmund Freud, religion is a mass neurosis and exists as a response to deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses. A by-product of psychological distress, Freud argued that it should be possible to eliminate the illusions of religion by alleviating that distress. This approach is laudable for getting us to recognize that there can be hidden psychological motives behind religion and religious beliefs, but his arguments from analogy are weak and too often his position is circular. Emile Durkheim - Religion Is a Means of Social Organization Emile Durkheim is responsible for the development of sociology and wrote that “...religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” His focus was the importance of the concept of the “sacred” and its relevance to the welfare of the community. Religious beliefs are sy...

Only a few decades ago, a Christian identity was so common among Americans that it could almost be taken for granted. As recently as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians. In other words, a steadily shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years. At the same time, having no religious affiliation has become “stickier”: A declining percentage of people raised without a religion have converted or taken on a religion later in life. While religious switching is the focus of this report, other demographic forces that can cause religious change – transmission, migration, fertility and mortality – will be briefly discussed in the second half of this chapter. Switching gained significant momentum in the 1990s, according to the Pew Research Center has been measuring religious identity since 2007 using a slightly different question wording – “What is your present religion, if any?” – as well as a different set of response options. Since 2007, the percentage of adults who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” in the Center’s surveys has grown from 16% to 29%. During this time, the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has fallen from 78% to 63%. There are many theories on why disaffiliation sped up so much in the 1990s and how long this trend might continue. For example, some...

Only a few decades ago, a Christian identity was so common among Americans that it could almost be taken for granted. As recently as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians. In other words, a steadily shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years. At the same time, having no religious affiliation has become “stickier”: A declining percentage of people raised without a religion have converted or taken on a religion later in life. While religious switching is the focus of this report, other demographic forces that can cause religious change – transmission, migration, fertility and mortality – will be briefly discussed in the second half of this chapter. Switching gained significant momentum in the 1990s, according to the Pew Research Center has been measuring religious identity since 2007 using a slightly different question wording – “What is your present religion, if any?” – as well as a different set of response options. Since 2007, the percentage of adults who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” in the Center’s surveys has grown from 16% to 29%. During this time, the share of U.S. adults who identify as Christian has fallen from 78% to 63%. There are many theories on why disaffiliation sped up so much in the 1990s and how long this trend might continue. For example, some...

Featured Old Testament The Old Testament is the first section of the Bible, covering the creation of Earth through Noah and the flood, Moses and more, finishing with the Jews being expelled to Babylon. The Bible’s Old Testament is very similar to the Hebrew Bible, which has origins in the ancient religion of Judaism. The exact […] Read more Read more about The Bible Judaism Judaism Beliefs Jewish people believe there’s only one God who has established a covenant—or special agreement—with them. Their God communicates to believers through prophets and rewards good deeds while also punishing evil. Most Jews (with the exception of a few groups) believe that their Messiah hasn’t yet come—but will one day. Jewish people worship in […] Islam Islam Facts Muhammad The prophet Muhammad, sometimes spelled Mohammed or Mohammad, was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in A.D. 570. Muslims believe he was the final prophet sent by God to reveal their faith to mankind. According to Islamic texts and tradition, an angel named Gabriel visited Muhammad in 610. while he was meditating in […] Buddhism Buddhism Beliefs Some key Buddhism beliefs include: Founder of Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism who later became known as “the Buddha,” lived during the 5th century B.C. Gautama was born into a wealthy family as a prince in present-day Nepal. Although he had an easy life, Gautama was moved by suffering in the […]