Homo Religiosus Analysis

Adhering to your religious and personal beliefs in a society where there have been generational shifts in attitudes toward nonmarital sex is challenging. These changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors are connected to growing cultural individualism in the United States. When a culture places more importance on the desires of the self and less on social rules, more relaxed attitudes toward sexuality are the almost inevitable result. You are faced with the decision of conforming to a society where the acceptance of premarital sex is at an all time high. Yet, your religion and personal beliefs have shaped your moral compass, which makes it evident that you do not wish to stray away from your decision of abstaining from sex until marriage. In efforts to assist you in effectively communicating your desires to your girlfriend we will evaluate your relationship through key communication concepts such as: culture, Social Exchange Theory, Social Penetration Theory, listening, and Self-Discrepancy Theory. .

Karen Armstrong, author of “Homo Religiosus,” claimed that without the physical rituals and traditions, religion morphed into a belief. Simply put, Armstrong argued that religion requires not only blind faith but also customs and practices that affect one’s physical and mental behaviors. It is through these rituals and taboos that the religions grows and forms, and yet also changes when deemed necessary. Additionally, Armstrong constantly compares religion to different art forms. She does this to convey the message that much like art, one must focus and study religion for lengthy periods of time to be properly understood. However, this connection also suggests that art and religion can perform an analogous role to humankind when required, as they both evolve and change when a society 's infrastructure does. Throughout her essay “Homo Religiosus,” Armstrong focuses on the similar role that both art and religion play in society to discuss her claim that religion is not just a belief, but rather has to do with changes in physical and mental behaviors that in return create change in society and the religion one needs.

Many people make an assumption they are not blind to life itself whether ignorance plays a part or pride. In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, it describes a few myths that society has portrayed and opinions of the visual impaired. The main focus is getting to know the person before drawing a conclusion. Its not fair to anyone to be neglected whether you are visual impaired or have the functionality of what is considered to be a normal human being.

People who are blind face many different problems in accomplishing everyday activities and becoming an independent individual. Some are able to overcome this issue while others struggle through it in their lives. In “Helen Keller’s Address before the New York Association for the Blind, January 15, 1907” she makes an appeal to the audience that the blind should be helped and made independent so that they can stand up and support themselves. She uses pathos or emotionally packed words, examples and anecdotes and cites from a prominent source to convince her audience that the blind are not helpless, but they are in need of guidance from people who can see in order to live and thrive independently.

The medieval world became increasingly cosmopolitan through their religious ideas, maintenance of communication through trade, and their expression of cultural values which allowed all societies to maintain a peaceful relationship with one another.

Throughout history, different civilizations have been exchanging and spreading ideas. Of these ideas, religion often spreads the most drastically, finding new roots in places throughout the world. These spreading religions can greatly affect the nations they spread to, often impacting the political, social, and economic aspects of an area. Religions such as Buddhism in Japan and Christianity in the Americas allowed their monarchies to strengthen their reign on their citizens, adapt their societies to the new theologies, and cultivate wealth through both trade and conquest.

She discusses those who have recently acquired the ability to see and how this affects how they interpret the new world around them. With no preconceived knowledge or ideas about what they are seeing, “vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning” (24). While our minds use what we already know to interpret and comprehend what we see, those who see for the first time have no previous knowledge telling them what they are looking at. Their minds are blank canvases, interpreting each line, shape, and shadow, attempting to piece every aspect of what their eyes are seeing to understand the full picture. While we would simply glance at an object, allowing our mind to fill in the details of what we are seeing based on the image we already have in our minds, the newly sighted do not have the ability to see in concepts as we do. Most of us cannot “remember ever having seen without understanding” (27) yet we still have the ability to learn how to see like this to an extent. Artistic talent aside, upon asking a newly sighted person and an artistically untrained person who had been seeing their whole life to draw the same object, the newly sighted person would have the ability to draw what they were truly seeing while the average person would draw what they knew they were seeing, ignoring the true shape and shadows of the object in front of them. Upon asking someone who has been trained

Most of the human ‘Homo sapiens’ is born into a religion. That religion could be Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian or Atheism, etc, a set of beliefs which someone inherits from his family, and till the death, that man will likely stay with his or her religion because almost every human has tendency to be religious. On the other hand, the reality of the religion does not matter to him unless someone conducts any investigation to get to the religious truth. In the essay ‘Homo religiosus,’ Karen Armstrong says that, today’s religious followers accept the religion into which they were born, without doing the hard work required. This means that someone follows his ancestor’s religion from the beginning for his life and he or she is not able to prove his ancestors were wrong because he or she has faith in his own religion. Faith is the main concept of the religion because people have deep faith in their own religion. In addition, faith is nothing but mere fantasy and faith has no basis in reality. Therefore, people have no ability to conduct investigations to find out the religious truth. In addition, elements and places of religion vary from religion to religion. Religion is one of the most prehistoric institutions which have been noticed to practice in any society past and present even in the ancient world where cave paintings were popular. Institutions, like politics and entertainments, have been greatly influenced by the religious faith. The truth of religion might give

Assess the view that religious beliefs and practices are changing to reflect a new era of diversity and choice.

In “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, the narrator can see but Robert is blind. They both have different views on life; one can actually see the physical world and the other cannot but has the ability to see life in a more intimate and simply deeper perspective. Carver makes it his goal to open people’s eyes to see that just because someone has the ability to look at the physical world that doesn’t mean that they can really see, meaning seeing past the outer shell of things and really coming to know and learn about everything on a deeper more intimate level. Life wouldn’t be as interesting if all humans only mastered the act of looking because that would be such a plain and boring way of looking at life and the many things that come with it. After

John Milton blindness might have stopped him from during many things but he surely didn’t stop doing what he loved. He continue writing and doing his day to day living for he might one day have to present his Maker an account of his live and his faith. “Milton’s faith in God seems to give him the courage to face his life despite his blindness. It is this faith that seems to give him courage and patience to cope and also gives him the hope that salvation lies for those who wait in patience (Darr). John Milton continue with his live even though he was blind but this didn’t stop him because he was doing what he loved and also because of his faith in God.

Mary Douglas informs us that the Lele religious of African use animal symbolism as reflection of ideas about social order. Lele religious life is organized around cults whom are symbolic to animals in order to the universe. The Lele universe consists of three separate spheres; however, they are also connected spheres- human, animal, and spiritual. Lele created an important categorization in distinctions between humans and animals in behavioral activities such as sleeping, feeding, reproduction, and mannerly conduct. To the Lele this is a categorical distinction towards social order. Through the order system of the Lele, anomalies (things that have no classification to Lele orders). The Lele have a ritual of avoidance associated with animals

The story “Cathedral” demonstrates that lack of sight does not necessarily prevent one from perceiving things as they are, or live their life to the fullest. In the story, a middle-age blind man, who is a friend to the narrator’s wife, and used to be her boss at one point, visits the narrator and his wife. The narrator has never interacted with blind people before, and all he knew about blind people was what he had seen on television. Blind people are stereotypically portrayed on television as slow moving, dull people, who never laugh. Based on this perception, the narrator was reluctant to meet the blind man and doubted whether they were going to connect. This is evident when the narrator states, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me” (Carver 1).

Hull with his acquiescent descent into “deep blindness”; Torey with his “compulsive visualization” and meticulous construction of an internal visual world; Tenberken with her impulsive, almost novelistic visual freedom, along with her remarkable and specific gift of synesthesia and Lusseyran, who identified himself as one of the “visual blind.” These individuals played a very active role in building up visual images, requiring months of cognitive discipline dedicated to improving visual imagery. Sacks asked himself these important questions for us to understand the process these blind individuals have been through to get to the point where they have mastered visual imagery. He says, “How much do these differences reflect an underlying predisposition independent of blindness? Do sighted people who are good visualizers, who have strong visual imagery, maintain or even enhance their powers of imagery if they become blind?”

“The Interfaith Amigos” is a TEDx talk by Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Imam Jamal Rahman. The talk seeks to address the longstanding polarization of and often violent conflict between their three major world religions. They attribute much of this to a general “stuckness,” which Rahman illustrates through the metaphor of a Mullah and his cheese sandwiches. One major example of this “stuckness,” as addressed later in the talk, is the overwhelming racism stemming from misinformation and stereotypes around past and current events.