Seeing Religion Differently

In the twentieth-century, Science and technology have had a significant impact on society, and their implications are continuing to grow. By drastically changing our means of communication, the way we work, clothes, and food, methods of transportation, and, even the length and quality of life itself, science has generated changes in the moral values and basic philosophies of humanity (James Burk, Jules Burgman, and Isaac Asimov, 1985). Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, presents the idea of what the twentieth-century society could become “if the values of order, profit, and power continue to prevail over spontaneous creativity, mutual respect, and pleasure, and cooperative idealism” (James Burk, Jules Burgman, and Isaac Asimov, 1985). The theme

The concept of religion has been a vital part of my life for as long as I can remember. Christianity in particular has served as the utmost precedence for my family and I, as I was raised on eminently well-built and eternal Christian values. From the time I can remember, I was always in and involved in the church, whether it was bible study, Sunday school, or just typical Sunday morning worship. Being raised and brought up in the comfort and shelter of the Christian religion has provided me with a genuine appreciation for it. In retrospect, the comfort and shelter of Christianity has sparked fascination and bewilderment. Throughout the emergence of my formal Christian education, there are countless things I hope

When I was a child, I was a devout Catholic. I went to church every week and prayed before I went to bed. It wasn't until I was a teenager when I started to question the faith. I started reading more and more about religion, and why I pray and go to church every Sunday, Christianity in particular. I soon realized that it was fabricated by man, but with good intentions. One major problem I had is that it stifles the intellectual mind and has a particular definite way of looking at things.

A worldview is a system of extreme convictions, suspicions, qualities, and thoughts regarding the universe and our place in it that shapes how a man comprehends their life and encounters and how that individual demonstration accordingly. Religion is most essentially characterized as the investigation of God. Each worldview has a religion; that is to say, it mirrors some sort of the point of view of God. Its perspective of God might be extremely exact or it might be exceptionally ambiguous. You may believe that the skeptical worldview can't have a religion since they deny there's a Divine being in any case. However, even agnostic worldview has something to say in regards to God, regardless of the fact that it's exclusive that he doesn't exist!

What is my worldview? What is my concept of religion within my worldview? I have had a long journey of growth and of struggle in my desire to find God. Starting from a young age, I had many questions concerning God and how involved he was in my life from a Protestant Christian perspective, to having what I would call a personal experience of the love of God as a child, which put me on the path to look for him. Just when I think I had God figured out, it’s as if my worldview got flipped upside down. So, my journey has been one of a constant changing worldview, never finding full comfort in any one area, denomination, or even religion. From a desire to be right within the particular denomination I was in, to finding out other

Religion Religion is a social institution involving beliefs and practices based on recognizing the sacred. Religiosity is the importance of religion in a person’s life. In scene one, Alicia’s father told her to “Pray, and pray hard and God will give you a miracle. God is good and you can always depend on him!” Christianity, the religion in this case, provides purpose and meaning in the sense that praying and having faith in God is believed to bring forth results.

Talal Asad published Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz in 1983. The article focuses on redefining Geertz concept of religion. More importantly, Asad explores the importance of power in religion. Talal's views were simple, Geertz formula was too simple to accommodate different cultures. With this in mind, Zande divination is a notion that explains unfortunate events. The concept of witchcraft supplies the missing link and inexplicable situations lead to rituals, revenge, and oracles. According to Asad (1983: 243), "It was not the mind that moved spontaneously to religious truth, but power that imposed the conditions for experiencing that truth." Agreeing with this, Zande does not profess to understand witchcraft,

The goal of this paper is to take a look at several different religions in an attempt to gain an understanding each religion in regard to their creation stories. The paper will consider the creation stories of 7 specific that range from western religion to more native religion. Specifically, the paper will discuss the creation story provided by Christianity, Islam, Native Americans, Africans, Hebrew, Chinese and Indian. It will provide insight on religion and what is believed about creation. It will also take into account the differences and similarities of the different religions. Ideally, it is believed that almost all religions are interrelated. They are either variations or parallel to one another. Particularly, in terms of stories, rules and overall beliefs.

The literatures on values in philosophy on observation and theory have to do with the distinction between the observable and unobservable. Objectivity comes in degrees. Claims, methods and results can be more or less objective, and, other things being equal. Using the term “objective” to describe something often carries a special rhetorical force with it. The admiration of science among the general public and the authority science enjoys in public life stems to a large extent from the view that science is objective or at least more objective than other modes of inquiry. Understanding scientific objectivity is therefore central to understanding the nature of science and the role it plays in society.

1) There are three different perspectives of understanding the religion that is listed in the text, one of them being materialist perspective. Materialist perspective says that humans invented religion, scientific materialism is a theory that says/explains that religion can be found in many different forms throughout cultures. Although in the nineteenth-century Ludwig Feuerbach reasoned that deities were objects of human qualities - power, wisdom, and love. He stated that we don't realize that theses qualities are within each other, we see ourselves as weak and sinful. There are other scientific materialists who believe religions were created to manipulate people. Another perspective is functional which states that religion is useful. In

In the understanding of Bernard Haring, “religion” is derived from three Latin words: “Ligare” (meaning to bind), “Relegere” (meaning to unite or to link), and “Religio” (meaning relationships) . According to Omoregbe, the much we may infer from this etymological account is that it shows “religion” to be “essentially a relationship.” Religion could be perceived as “a bi-polar phenomenon , which places man on the one end and the transcendent on the other end of the same relationship. It is something that links or unites man with a transcendent being a deity, believed to exist and worshipped by man. So, in religion, a deity is worshipped. Whether such deity really exists or is simply the figment of the imagination of the religious man is not important to the conception of religion. In so far as the deity is really believed by the religious man to actually exist, there is indeed religion. For the religious man, the deity is a reality. The concept of deity is essential to the concept of religion. Hence where a belief in a deity is lacking, there can be no religion since religion is essentially a relationship established between man and a deity, that is, a transcendent personal being, believed to exist. Considering this therefore, A.C. Bouquet defines religion as:

Religion is a big deal for my culture. I was taught to go to church every Sunday, praise the Lord, and always pray. I grew up going to Sunday school, and being all around the church environment. Until I was about 15, I started to play club volleyball, and we played the tournaments on Sunday. Whenever I didn’t have a tournament, I would always go to church. My grandpa was always the one to take me. No one else in

As a result of the immensely diverse nature of the phenomena it intends to understand, the study of religion requires a multitude of analytic methods. Consequently, these methods may be categorized as either being grounded in empirical analysis of biological, psychological, or physiological data - producing a perspective which is exclusively characterized as outsider. Thus, according to this definition, Sigmund Freud’s application of his Oedipus Complex theory is a near perfect example of an explanatory Classical Psychological Approach to religion, claiming that individuals turn to an “omnipotent, benevolent father figure” (Kanaris) alleviate the sexual anxiety which develops when children begin viewing their parent of the opposite sex as an object of desire. In this sense, Freud negatively reduces the phenomena to an infantile form of escapism from life’s hardships. Furthermore, Freud alleges that this immature psychological response will eventually give way to “the more excellent procedure of science.”(Kanaris) This conclusion makes evident the foremost flaw of conduction studies which are purely explanatory: they tend to be

My parents have been avid Christians since a few years before I was born. Both had been Catholic as children, and both stopped going for different reasons. After my

I grew up in a Catholic home. From my earliest memories, I believed in God and knew He existed. Every week we faithfully attended our local parish. There was no Sunday School so we sat with our parents during mass. I remember my youngest sister, Jennifer, playing with my Dad’s keys