(Jody Gray) The importance and value of religion to individuals, is undeniable. The danger lies in the doctrines that were created that claim their “religion” - their God - to be the only righteous one and make enemies of any who won’t convert -directing their followers to convert or destroy people and sacred objects of any religion that is different. This is just one of my Blog Posts related to Religion, Origins: where did what exists now, come from? And, why am I your enemy? See, Blog Post: Religion, Cross Reference. . http://indextoblogposts.*
Religion: the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
Religion [https://en.wikipedia.] is any cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, world views, texts, sanctified places, ethics, or organizations, that relate humanity to the supernatural or transcendental. Religions relate humanity to what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has referred to as a cosmic “order of existence”.
...Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, and symbols and holy places, that aim mostly to give a meaning to life. Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that have the side purpose of explaining the origin of life, the Universe and other things. Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs. There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide. About 84% of the world’s population is affiliated with one of the five largest religions, namely Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or forms of folk religion.
With the onset of the modernisation of and the scientific revolution in the western world, some aspects of religion have cumulatively been criticized. The religiously unaffiliated demographic include those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists and agnostics…
*there are many interesting Contents ; e.g. 6. Related aspects: Reason and science; Morality and religion; Politics; Economics; Health; Superstition; Secularism and atheism. 7. Criticism of religious violence.
Religion. ...In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an individual virtue of worship, never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. The modern concept of “religion” as an abstraction which entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines is a recent invention in the English language since the usage began with texts from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and more prevalent colonization or globalization in the age of exploration which involved contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures with non-European languages. It was in the 17th century that the concept of “religion” received its modern shape despite the fact that ancient tests like the Bible, the Quran, and other ancient sacred texts did not have a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written. For example, the Greek word threskeia, which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus and is found in texts like the New Testament, is sometimes translated as “religion” today, however, the term was understood as “worship” well into the medieval period. In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated as “religion” in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed din as “law”... It was in the 19th century that the terms “Buddhism”, “Hinduism”, “Taoism”, and “Confucianism” first emerged. Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of “religion” since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea.
Mythology. Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called “myths” in the anthropology of religion. The term “myth” can be used pejoratively by both religious and nonreligious people. By defining another person’s religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one’s own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked, “Mythology is often thought of as other people’s religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology.”
In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the resurrection of their real-life founder Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin, is symbolic of the power of life over death, and is also said to be a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old “life” and the start of a new “life” is what is most significant. Religious believers may or may not accept such symbolic interpretations.
Social organisation. Religions have a societal basis, either as a living tradition which is carried by lay participants, or with an organized clergy, and a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership.
Abrahamic religions believe they descend from Abraham. Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion, originating in the people of ancient Israel and Judea. The Torah is its foundational text, and is part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. It is supplemented by oral tradition, set down in written form in later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud… Rabbinic Judaism, holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai… The Jewish people were scattered after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE…
Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus or Nazareth (1st century) as presented in the New Testament. The Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and as Savior and Lord. Almost all Christians believe in the Trinity, which teaches the unity of Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. Most Christians can describe their faith with the Nicene Creed. As the religion of Byzantine Empire in the first millennium and of Western Europe during the time of colonization, Christianity has been propagated throughout the world. The main division of Christianity are, according to the number of adherents: The Catholic Church, led by the Bishop of Rome… Eastern Christianity, which include Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East. Protestantism, separated from the Catholic Church in the 16th century Protestant Reformation and is split into thousands of denominations. Major branches: Anglicans, Baptists, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Methodism… Restorationism, the belief that Christianity should be restored (as opposed to reformed) along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church. Latter Day Saint movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the late 1820s. Jehovah’s Witnesses, founding in the late 1870s by Charles Taze Russell.
Islam is based on the Quran, one of the holy books considered by Muslims to be revealed by God, and on the teachings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a major political and religious figure of the 7th century CE. Islam is the most widely practiced religion of Southeast Asia, North Africa, Western Asia, and Central Asia, Western Asia, and Central Asia, while Muslim-majority countries also exist in parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeastern Europe. There are also several Islamic republics, including Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania, and Afghanistan.
The Baha'i Faith is an Abrahamic religion founded in 19th century Iran and since then has spread worldwide. It teaches unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as additional prophets including its founder Bahaullah.
East Asian religions.
Indian religions.
Indigenous and folk. characterised by shamanism, animism and ancestor worship, where traditional means “indigenous, that which is aboriginal or foundational, handed down from generation to generation…”
Interfaith cooperation. Because religion continues to be recognized in Western thought as a universal impulse, many religious practitioners have aimed to band together in interfaith dialogue, cooperation, and religious peace-building. The first major dialogue was the Parliament of the World’s Religions at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which affirmed “universal values” and recognition of the diversity of practices among different cultures. The 20th century has been especially fruitful in use of interfaith dialogue as a means of solving ethnic, political, or even religious conflict, with Christian-Jewish reconciliation representing a complete reverse in the attitudes of many Christian communities towards Jews.
Recent interfaith initiatives include “A Common Word”, launched in 2007 and focused on bringing Muslim and Christian leaders together, the “C1 World Dialogue”, the “Common Ground” initiative between Islam and Buddhism, and a United Nations sponsored “World Interfaith Harmony Week”.
Origins and development. According to anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just, “Many of the great world religions appear to have begun as revitalization movements of some sort, as the vision of a charismatic prophet fires the imaginations of people seeking a more comprehensive answer to their problems than they feel is provided by everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have emerged at many times and places in the world. It seems that the key to long-term success… has relatively little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising regularity, but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who are able to institutionalize the movement.”
...Some religions claim to be universal, believing their laws and cosmology to be binding for everyone… associated with public institutions such as education, hospitals, the family, government, and political hierarchies.
Anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just state that, “it seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal with problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and intolerable. One important way in which religious beliefs accomplish this is by providing a set of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortune.
Reason and science. Science acknowledges reason, empiricism, and evidence; and religions include revelation, faith and sacredness whilst also acknowledging philosophical and metaphysical explanations with regard to the study of the universe. Both science and religion are not monolithic, timeless, or static because both are complex social and cultural endeavors that have changed through time across languages and cultures.
The concepts of “science” and “religion” are a recent invention: “religion” emerged in the 17th century in the midst of colonization and globalization and the Protestant Reformation, “science” emerged in the 19th century out of natural philosophy in the midst of attempts to narrowly define those who studied nature (“natural science”), and the phrase “religion and science” emerged in the 19th century due to the reification of both concepts… In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin roots of both science and religion were understood as inner qualities of the individual or virtues, never as doctrines, practices, or actual sources of knowledge.
In general the scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by experiments and thus only answers cosmological questions about the universe that can be observed and measured. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement, or even rejection, in the face of additional evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as de facto verities in general parlance, such as the theories of general relativity and natural selection to explain respectively the mechanisms of gravity and evolution.
Religion does not have a method per se partly because religions emerge through time from diverse cultures and it is an attempt to find meaning in the world, and to explain humanity’s place in and relationship to it and to any posited entities. In terms of Christian theology and ultimate truths, people rely on reason, experience, scripture, and tradition to test and gauge what they experience and what they should believe. Furthermore, religious models, understanding, and metaphors are also revisible, as are scientific models.
Morality and religion. Many religions have value frameworks regarding personal behavior meant to guide adherents in determining between right and wrong… “good thoughts, good words, and good deeds” concept… Religion and morality are not synonymous. Morality does not necessarily depend upon religion although this is “an almost automatic assumption.”
(Jody Gray) various research results are given pertaining to the generosity, etc. religious versus nonreligious individuals. I don’t put much stock in these surveys, etc. as they depend on what the individual “says” -we have no way of knowing if the individual is being truthful. If you ask a teenager if they’ve had sex or if they drink or use drugs; many are going to give an answer that pertains to how they want to be seen. A “good girl/boy” will say most likely say no; a “rebel’ will most likely say yes.
[The Barna Group, founded in 1984 by George Barna… for the purpose of providing “research and marketing expertise as a service to Christian ministry.”] According to a 2003 survey conducted in the United States by The Barna Group, those who described themselves as believers were less likely than those describing themselves as atheists or agnostic to consider the following behaviors morally acceptable: cohabiting with someone of the opposite sex outside of marriage, enjoying sexual fantasies, having an abortion, sexual relationships outside of marriage, gambling, looking at pictures of nudity or explicit sexual behavior, getting drunk, and “having a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex.” (Jody Gray) This type of survey implies that “believers” are “better people”. One of the most disturbing contradictions to this type of theory is when religious icons are proven to be sexual predators and users of the services of prostitutes…
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