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Essay on Religion in a Multicultural World

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Religion
In a multicultural world where language, traditions and culture differ from country to country there is one thing that may be deemed to be true and this is that religion is the centre point for most of them. So then what exactly is religion? And how can you define it? In this paper I will be analysing and considering the different definitions that have been proposed by Victoria S. Harrison in her article “The pragmatics of defining religion in a multi-cultural world” and what I consider to be the most applicable definition of religion to date, though there may not be one. Firstly before we can analyse a text we must first understand what the author or publisher of that particular text is trying to bring forward. In Harrison’s …show more content…

Intellectual definition
Harrison suggests that “Intellectual definitions stipulate that the defining, or essential, feature of religion is belief about a particular sort of object” (Harrison, 2006, pg. 133) e.g. Man worshiping God. Using this definition many believe that there is a spiritual war going on and that from the beginning of time there has always been a strong force or power keeping humans safe and away from darkness one can say a war between light and darkness which have affected cultures and societies within different communities. The stories which were told and passed from generation to generations about God and the devil have caused us as humans to accept the order of things that were brought to us by ministers and priests of that particular religion. Denying the fact that man worshipping God does not play a good percentage in the role of defining religion would be wrong but in saying this though this particular definition looks into the fulfilment that one gets from worshipping God as a whole yet it fails to recognise the different aspects or dimensions of religion such as the emotionality of it, the traditional roles that are practiced within it and the importance of the faith circulating it. So in saying this if one was to regard this definition as being the main source of which he or she would base the definition of religion upon they would be

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