Principles for Cognizing the Sacred Essay

In the article “Redefining Myth and Religion: Introduction to a Conversation,” Dr. Loyal D. Rue discusses how science, religion, and myth are related and how they coexist. Some people may argue that science and religion should not coincide and that they are opposites. However, Rue argues, “…In an ideal world, the vocabulary of science would inform the myth that binds together the culture.” In this statement, Rue claims that science can be used to help explain the supernatural phenomena that religion and myths describe. Science is not anti-religion; it helps us to explain religion in ways that humans can understand.

Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane analyzes a wide variety of components that are found within various world religions. Eliade uses the history of religion to support his ideas as the the book itself is a brief introduction to religion as a whole, particulary the religions of primitive societies. Nonetheless, when looking to the past one can see that mankind’s desire to associate itself with the sacred has been occuring for thousands of years. From temples to passages of intiation, religious man is a unique microcosm that follows and repeats the structure of the religious macrocosm, the creation of the cosmos. One can conclude that Eliade views religion as the “paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis.” (p210) and

Dialogue is more than talking. It is not the straightforwardness of talking to or at, rather it is communicating with or between. It is "a relation between persons that is characterized in more or less degree by the element of inclusion" (Buber, 97). Inclusiveness is an acknowledgment of the other person, an event experienced between two persons, mutual respect for both views and a willingness to listen to the views of the other. These elements are the heart of dialogical relations. In this paper I will examine Martin Buber’s theory of communication, its relevance to my life and the critiques of the theory.

Elialde author of The Sacred and the Profane introduces a new model of the sacred and the profane. Elialde’s model is meant to be universal, therefore meant to be appropriate for any recognized religion. David Carrasco author of Religions of Mesoamerica and Kay Almere Read and Jason J. González authors of Mesoamerican Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs of Mexico and Central America, discuss their interpretation of the Mesoamerican religion although their views on the Mesoamerican religion differs in some aspects when compared to Eliade’s model of the sacred and the profane there are a few noticeable similarities between both views.

The anthropological studies of religion show that individuals use religion to serve different purposes, but they rarely note that these functions are different in some cultures. These religions involve both cosmological and transcendental which vary in their beliefs and practices. The transcendental religions view the existence of the universe as strong evidence for God’s presence. This religion assumes a Supreme God created the universe and that he still maintains its existence. Cosmology, on the contrary, is highly individualistic in both character and philosophical outlook and they resist any common doctrinal stance. While transcendentalists believe in ultimate power in supernatural powers, cosmological religions believe in ultimate power from the natural world. The essay will compare between two cosmological religions which include, archaic religion and the primitive religion as well as one transcendentalist religion of Christianity together with how disenchantment de-legitimize cosmological religions.

For purpose of this essay, religion will be defined as a collection of institutional beliefs and customs concerning humanity and the purpose of the universe [1]. Key beliefs within religion that will be explored, as well as there relation to reason, are:

With the current knowledge of humans, these matters cannot be adequately explained. Furthermore, these ideas cannot be expressed with current human language (Barbour 90). To compensate for the inability to explain the unexplainable and the lack of sufficient answers to life’s questions, Judeo-Christian religions tend to employ tangible phenomena as much as possible. The concept of sacred space is important to religions, because it offers a tangible representation of the religion for its believers. This can help to humanize the supernatural and the concept of spirituality. Sacred space helps to provide a structure for religions, as it closes the gaps of understanding of concepts that are difficult to grasp with human understanding.

I will be focusing my paper around analysis of traditional Marxist ideologies in comparison with post-war Stalinist ideologies which claimed to embody Marxist ideals through their implication within the Soviet Union. By doing this I intend on proving to the reader that Soviet Marxism was a tool of oppression and inequality in eastern and central Europe.

Over the course of human history every society, even the most culturally isolated of civilizations, has developed some form of faith-system for interpreting and understanding the spiritual and material worlds. Thousands of such systems have existed over the centuries, and as tribes and cultures expanded, these faith-systems inevitably met each other face-to-face and clashed. Two thousand years ago there was a particularly important collision; one between the Roman stoic and the gentile Christian. At this time in Western civilization, Christianity was just planting its seeds and beginning to grow, whereas stoicism was already legitimate in its foundation and strong in its following (Stavrianos 100). One might wonder

One of the earliest evidences of the belief in a higher power comes from deep within the “Lascaux Labyrinth”, a deep cave “decorated by our Paleolithic ancestors in the stone age, seventeen thousand years ago”(Armstrong 2). The great numbers and locations of art within the Lascaux and surrounding region gives evidence that these were sacred places for the purpose of rituals, and some have compared these dwellings to temples (Armstrong 3). Whether art within cave dwellings dating back to the Paleolithic era, to magnificent churches rising to great heights around the world, the wondrous temples of the Mayans, a mountain that appears to seamlessly morph into the city of Machu Picchu, to trailers, tents and fortified compounds, belief in a power higher than one’s self has been deeply ingrained throughout centuries and a multitude of cultures. These different places are what many refer to as a church, a place to record and follow the rituals specific to their belief and to worship. Through the generations of the development of the human psyche, belief in a higher power is taught young and ingrained for many, yet meaningless for some. Furthermore, throughout the evolution of many centuries, it is inevitable that branches of these religions will follow a different path, create new churches to better practice their views of religion, and for some, belief in a higher power can be contorted to the preaching’s and worship of hate. There is a fine line between preaching scriptures and

Apocalypse of Peter Typically, humanity is characterized by diversity. Therefore, every aspect of human life is multifaceted and harbors a wide range of points of view. Including religion; For instance, people’s ways of worshiping god concerns others, two different religions will be examined Christianity and Greco Roman Mystery Religion for the purposes of this paper. However, sometimes similarities stand out in the midst of glaring differences.

Pneumatological imagination is defined by Yong as a “selectively valuation enterprise, beginning with imagination and processing toward interpretation, theory, and the pursuit of responsibility” (Oliverio). Yong developed a strong importance for developing a divine presence for the Lord. His pneumatological categories help us seek the undermining true identity and purpose of God in creation. Yong challenges the theory of discernment to go along with the three pneumatological categories. A relationship that is constructed through the divine presence “marks the reality of God, the divine absence of the destructive, false, evil, ugly, and profane existence of the fallen” (Davis). Yong challenges the church to look closely to the spirit of all the people, cultures, and

Greek Gods and Goddess are feared and revered by human beings’ in the early 7th century. Their existence came into fruition by the reality of this frightening world. Indeed, human beings were not competent enough to make scientific analysis, therefore the second best thing is to depict these natural occurrences as a sign of a God. Through history religion has played a significant role in society from, the God Zeus to Jesus Christ, mankind needed to associate the world with the divine. Questions like what made this universe, who is this god and why should we worship this god? Robert Graves stated that myth had two main function, the first function is used to satisfy human curiosity and the second is to create a social system which order can

What makes Schelling set Christianity apart from other traditions is precisely its character of being a revealed religion. Mythology is a natural process like healing, and thus, argues Schelling, “[mythology] is a religion where no productive role is given to the deity as such.” Christianity, however, is another story. Thanks to God’s special act of revelation, Christianity is based on the full awareness of God according to his spirituality, and bears what mythologies lack. In other words, all the traditional symbols of Christianity and their dogmatic expositions stand as representations of an image of God where the three potencies are reconciled as One. Hence, while the birth of Christianity is not the last development of the relationship between God and humanity, in Christianity the theogonical process comes to an end in that after it there is no further progression in the development of our images of God. Christian representations of God are ‘perfect’, insofar as they do not lack anything in terms of opening a way for us to be conscious of God’s nature.

In the 20th century the question of natural theology was under deep debate. While the enlightenment had a deep confidence in gaining knowledge of God through observation of the natural world, this attitude was deeply criticised in both philosophy and theology. On the one hand Heidegger criticized this project as deeply ontotheological confusing the distinction between beings and the Being of beings. Moreover as a result of this enterprise, one was left with the philosopher’s God at best, a god to which one could not praise, pray to or sacrifice. On the other hand Barth lambasted it as denying the subjectivity of God, and submitting God to the same kind of being as humans, reducing the creator to the realm of the created while simultaneous denying the finitude and falleness of human rationality. For Barth there could be no “point of contact” and the analogy of being of the medieval period must be scrapped for the analogy of faith, an inbreaking from the top down miracle of grace . But while Barth claims Natural theology as an irrelevant for revelation, Natural theology is the condition of possibility of the human side of revelation. This will be shown through a critical examination of Barth’s doctrine of revelation, an appropriation of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of revelation and an exploration of Pannenberg’s theological method.