Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Let’s talk a bit about world religions.
There are probably more than 6,000 religions in the world today. Many writers, when discussing religion, focus on world religions: those religions which are found throughout the world and which transcend cultural boundaries through proselytization and/or migration. Most frequently world religions have: (1) major texts, including sacred books, (2) foundational ideas, beliefs, and worldviews, (3) particular histories and leaders, and (4) a sense of distinct identity, including a name. Very often books and college courses on comparative religion are really comparing world religions.
World religions would include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Hinduism. Some of these are monotheistic (having a single god), such as Judaism and Islam; some are polytheistic (having multiple gods or god-figures), such as Hinduism and Christianity; and some are atheistic (having no god), such as Buddhism. Regarding Buddhism, anthropologist Barbara King, in her book Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, writes:
“Today the vast majority of Buddhists also reject the notion of a powerful or omniscient or omnipotent divine being. Instead, the focus in Buddhism relates to one’s striving to overcome suffering and to reach enlightenment.”
One of the important characteristics of world religions is that they are based on writing. The primal religions, which are much earlier, were based on oral traditions which are passed down from generation to generation. In many, the texts of some of the world religions began as oral traditions which were written down. Since writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago, there are a few fundamentalists who insist that the world itself is only 5,000 years or so old.
In the primal religions there is an emphasis on having a personal interaction with the spiritual. With writing, the distance between spiritual experience and the individual increases and there is an emphasis on studying the written spiritual experiences rather than seeking them out personally. Nicholas Wade, in his 2009 book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, writes:
“The sacred texts further increased the distance between believers and the supernatural. Direct experience of the interface with the supernatural world, as experienced by hunter gatherers in their trance dances, was long gone. The evidence of the supernatural world increasingly came from sacred texts recording revelations held to have occurred in the distant past.”
Nicholas Wade also writes:
“With the advent of literacy, religious narratives could now be written down and studied. The sacred text became an increasingly prominent part of religious practice, matching the shift in emphasis from ritual to belief.”
With regard to the transformation from an oral tradition to written texts, Karen Armstrong, in her book The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions, writes:
“Religious truth sounded completely different when presented in this way. Everything was clear, cut-and-dried—very different from the more elusive ‘knowledge’ imparted by oral transmission.”
With regard to the impact of writing on religion, Thomas Suddendorf, in his book The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, writes:
“Some written teachings came to be revered as originating from divine sources, and sacred scriptures have had an incredibly powerful and enduring influence.”
Thomas Suddendorf also writes:
“Written down, moral teachings became standardized and so could proliferate like no oral traditions had done. Social norms became written laws.”
Webb Keane, in a chapter in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, writes:
“For religions ‘of the book,’ the very existence of a written scripture is often taken as evidence of claims of authority that transcends any particular context, and provides semiotic grounds for their intuitive verification.”
Since world religions tend to have sacred texts, some scholars focus their comparative study of religion on only these texts. Malory Nye, in his book Religion: The Basics, writes:
“A study of religion, however, that concentrates solely on the texts themselves and how the text should be understood in terms of its authors and its intended meaning is seriously in danger of missing the point.”
The point, of course, is that religions do not exist in an isolated vacuum; they are intimately involved with human behavior and like other aspects of human behavior they reflect language, social organization, and other aspects of culture. This means that like other aspects of culture, religions change through time. The practice and meaning of the Catholic religion to the people in Dingle, Ireland is not the same today as it was a thousand years ago. Religions, including the world religions, are not unchanging even though their written texts may remain basically the same.
Since religion is an integral part of culture, this means that the “same” religion expressed in different cultures will manifest itself differently according to the culture. Christianity in the United States is culturally different than Christianity in Mexico; Buddhism in Japan is different than Buddhism in the United States. When religion is studied “on the ground” rather than through sacred texts or the writings of theologians, ethnographers generally notice that there are significant differences between what people say about their religion and the way in which they actually practice it. There is often a melding of the external beliefs of the world religion with the local cultural worldview.
Looking at the differences in time and place (or culture) with regard to the study of Christianity, Malory Nye writes:
“The assumption we often make that the Christian traditions found in such different contexts amount to the ‘same thing’ (the same ‘religion’) needs to be reassessed. Instead we should start with the assumption that these different Christianities can only be understood in their own particular terms.”
Why are world religions popular? Why do they attract followers from different cultural traditions? In Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader, Vine Deloria writes:
“The attraction of the world religions appears to be their knowledge and idealism, their precise manner of articulating answers to perennial human questions about life, death, and meaning, and their ability to preach and teach methods of living that will enable people to survive in a world that often seems hostile.”
World religions often tend to be ecclesiastical, which means that they have full-time religious practitioners who manage the actual practice of the religion. This means that there is a distinction between the full-time practitioners and the lay people. It also means that the practice and understanding of the religion will be different for the full-time practitioners than it is for the lay people.
Open Thread
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