WHAT IS RELIGION? A FIRST LOOK

WHAT IS RELIGION? A FIRSTLOOK Lesson 5: The Divine and Ultimate Reality Don E. Peavy, Sr., M.Div.,J.D.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK • “What if God was one of us • Just a slob like one of us • Just a stranger on the bus • Trying to make his way home • Just tryin’ to make his way home” • Joan Osborne

OBJECTIVES • (1) Differentiate among the primary religious worldviews, analyze each into universal components, and provide contrasting illustrations of each component. (2) Analyze and classify accounts of religious experience using such standard categories as numinous, possessional, contemplative, prophetic, introvertive, and extrovertive. (3) Compare, contrast, and assess the rationality of the concepts of deity, cosmos, and evil proposed by the major religious worldviews.

THE SACRED AND THE HOLY HOW IS THE HOLY MANIFESTED?

WHAT IS YOUR ULTIMATE REALITY? • PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR IMAGE, IDEA, CONCEPT OF ULTIMATE REALITY -- THAT IS, WHERE DO YOU EXPECT TO GO WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES FOR THE LAST TIME?

THE DIVINE AS ULTIMATE REALITY • “Sacred power is the ultimate object of religion.” • “Any object or event that elicits unique feelings of awe and aversion possesses sacred power.” • This power may be experienced as transcendent (“above or apart from”) or immanent (“to dwell within”).

“THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF HUMANKIND, UNTIL APPROXIMATELY 2000 B.C.E., WAS LARGELY ANIMISTIC AND POLYTHEISTIC,” 201.

ANIMISTIC • Sprit is often closely tied to a specific object such as a spring, a rock, a tree, a star, etc. It can leave at will and move through space. • Spirits are “animate and conscious agents, like man, but differ from man in the nature of the powers ascribed to them,” D.45. • Animism then is simply the worship of spirits, and the worship of ancestor spirits gives rise to the worship of gods and goddesses.

POLYTHEISTIC • Definition: Recognition and worship of more than one god; conceives of sacred power as being manifested in diverse forms. • Each polytheistic cult “reflects the practical needs and concerns of these early societies,” L.193. • “Here, we see a characteristic phenomenon of all religions: the move away from the otherness or absolute transcendence of the

sacred and toward more immanent dynamic, and accessible forms of sacred power, especially in rites and sacraments,” L.194. “However, when sacred power becomes too localized, as in the belief in mana or in animism, the pendulum often moves in the opposite direction, toward more transcendent, less localized expressions of deity. mana -- impersonal, supernatural force. “It is the distinguishing characteristic of any sacred being,” it is ‘that which permits the production of effects that are outside the ordinary powers of men, and outside the ordinary processes of nature,’ D.59 Is mana the same as Weber’s charisma?

DEFINITIONS • Anthropomorphic -- possessing human-like qualities. • Dualism -- perception of the world as constituted by or living under the ordering of two coequal, and often coeternal, sacred powers. • Pantheism -- “is the belief that all existing things are in some sense divine.”

MONISM • Definition: “There is only one divine Being or Reality and that all finite things are simply modes or appearances of that One,” L.206-7. • Oftentimes considered synonymous with pantheism.

ADDITIONAL DEFINITIONS • Monotheism -- belief in a superior god or as is commonly understood today, belief that there is only one god. • Henotheism -- Belief in many gods, but worship of and belief in only one superior god. • Theophany -- appearance of the divine.

DEISM • DEISM DEFINED • Deism is defined in Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1941, as: "[From Latin Deus, God.Deity] The doctrine or creed of a Deist." And Deist is defined in the same dictionary as: "One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason." • This common sense approach to God and a spiritual philosophy can not only bring a lasting profound sense of peace and happiness to the individual, but it also has the potential to go light years in eradicating religious fear, superstition and violence.

DEISM (Contd.) • How do Deists view God? We view God as an eternal entity whose power is equal to his/her will. The following quote from Albert Einstein also offers a good Deistic description of God: "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.“ • http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm

THEISM • Definition of Theism: Theism may be defined as belief in a god or gods. Some religions have many gods; some have only one. Some religions are theistic; others are not. Theism is the opposite of atheism, which is belief that there is no god. Biblical theism is belief in the Judeo-Christian God, i.e., the God presented in the Bible. • Biblical theism encompasses many subtopics. A study of the God of the Bible will necessarily focus attention on the Godhead, composed of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It relates to the nature and attributes of God, the pre-existence and deity of Christ, the person and operation of the Holy Spirit, and a host of other subcategories.

THEISM (Contd.) • http://www.biblicaltheism.com/ • Pascal's Wager • The seventeenth-century mathematician, Blaise Pascal, formulated this pragmatic argument for justifying belief in God: which is worth the risk of error, belief or nonbelief? • http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/wager.html

THE SACRED • “Most scholars today agree that religion is a system of activities and beliefs directed toward that which is perceived to be sacred or of ultimate value and power.” (Livingston 39) • The sacred is that which evokes some type of power that ordinary things do not evoke. • The sacred, while evincing some degree of power, also projects a sense of taboo – that is “a source of wonder and purity as well as of fear and danger.”

THE SACRED (Contd.) • (40) • The manifestation of the sacred is a hierophany. • The manifestation of the sacred in the form of a divine being is an epiphany. • The manifestation of the sacred as a god is a theophany. • The profane is anything ordinary and powerless.

THE SACRED (Contd.) • Historically, all types of things have been considered sacred: rocks, streams, animals, plants, etc. • When the sacred appears as spirit it is called animism – worship of spirits, of which ancestor worship is the oldest form.

DURKHEIM AND WEBER • You will not need to know the differences between them for the final. • Durkheim is a sociologist and Weber is an economist/historian of religion. • Weber sought to explain the sociology of religion in historical perspective whereas Durkheim was more concerned with how people came to hold the beliefs they held and how these reflected “the real.”

EMILE DURKHEIM • 1858 – 1917

DURKHEIM (Contd.) • French sociologist and psychologist. • Born into a family of rabbis; early years spent in rabbinical schools. • Developed early interest in Catholicism. • Soon rejected any particular religious belief. • At 29, published observations of German intellectual life and appointed professor.

DURKHEIM (Contd.) • With Durkheim’s appointment, for the first time the social sciences are taught at a French university (1887) Also, gets married. • 1893 published “Division of Labor.” • 1895 “Rules of Sociological Method.” • 1897 “Suicide.” • 1898 started journal of sociology.

DURKHEIM (Contd.) • 1906 he is a prized intellectual in France. He is appointed chair of science of education and sociology. • 1915 his son, Andrew, dies of war wounds in Bulgaria. Durkheim suffers a stroke in less than a year. • 1917 dies at age 59.

MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS • Obsessed with pursuit of theory that would give scientific reasoning to social phenomena. • Developed notion of collective representations. • There are social influences that exist outside of individual’s consciousness (i.e. money system, language).

CONTRIBUTIONS (Contd.) • Feeling generated by crowd cannot be reduced to one individual of the crowd. • Individual is born into set of religious practices and beliefs that are external to the individual and are coercive and compelling out of sheer habit in some respects • Social forces constrain us to follow certain external expectations.

THE NOTION OF SPIRITS • “A soul is not a spirit. … a spirit is closely tied to a particular object as its preferred residence …” • “The soul has no influence over anything other than the body it animates … [though] it has the same freedom of movement as a spirit [after death].” • “A ghost, however, is not a true spirit.” (276-77)

Contd. • “It is a vagabond being with no clear-cut responsibility, since the effect of death was to set it outside all the regular structures.” • “[A] spirit always has some sort of power and indeed is defined by that power.” • “But some souls meet this dual condition and thus are spirits proper.”

EPISTEMOLOGY • What we have been discussing is how people come to know the sacred and to articulate their religion and rites. • We have been inquiring into the nature of knowledge – how people know what they claim to know. • This is epistemology. We have various ways of conducting our investigations.

EPISTEMOLOGY • “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. It attempts to answer the basic question: what distinguishes true (adequate) knowledge from false (inadequate) knowledge? Practically, this questions translates into issues of scientific methodology: how can one develop theories or models that are better than competing theories? It also forms one of the pillars of the new sciences of cognition, which developed from the information processing approach to psychology, and from artificial intelligence, as an attempt to develop computer programs that mimic a human's capacity to use knowledge in an intelligent way.

EPISTEMOLOGY • “Let us start with the Greek philosophers. In Plato's view knowledge is merely an awareness of absolute, universal Ideas or Forms, existing independent of any subject trying to apprehend to them. Though Aristotle puts more emphasis on logical and empirical methods for gathering knowledge, he still accepts the view that such knowledge is an apprehension of necessary and universal principles. Following the Renaissance, two main epistemological positions dominated philosophy: empiricism, which sees knowledge as the product of sensory perception, and rationalism which sees it as the product of rational reflection.” http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/EPISTEMI.html

EPISTEMOLOGY • “The exact province of epistemology is as yet but imperfectly determined, the two main views corresponding to the two meanings of the Greek word epistéme. According as this is understood in its more general sense of knowledge, or in its more special sense of scientific knowledge, epistemology is "the theory of the origin, nature and limits of knowledge"

WRAP-UP • http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05506a.htm • For this course, our task is to explore the many ways that people come to know what they claim to know. We shall do so toward achieving an understanding of these claims and the lives of people. • Sometimes, as we employ our critical thinking skills, we can do no more than pass by these matters with bemused quiet.

WRAP-UP (Contd.) • Hopefully, we have come close to understanding god-talk – that is, what do people mean when they talk about god(s). • It may be that the time has come to abandon the question of whether god exists. The more relevant question seems to be what is the nature of god? • Is god an idea, a concept, a human wish, projection, etc.? • Is god creator or created?

References • Livingston, James C., Anatomy of the Sacred: An Introduction to Religion, 5th ed., Pearson Education (2005). ISBN: 0131835645. • James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. and with an intro. by Martin E. Marty.

References • . The James book is available online at:http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm • Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. By Karen E. Fields, New York: The Free Press (1995).

WHAT IS RELIGION? A FIRST LOOK