WHAT IS RELIGION?

What is Religion?

Religion gives a person identity and relationship.

Religion deals with answers to identity-forming questions:

Selfhood - "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?"

Meaning - "Why am I?" "Where will I go when I die?"

Purpose - "What do I do?" "What is the purpose of life?"

These deep searching identity questions are a pervasive part of human experience and thought by some to be the source of the world's great religions. Religions answer these questions for people in psychological satisfying multidimensional ways.

Religion is relationship guiding or defining

How do we relate to the Other? Religions give people understandable paradigms that guide our behaviour in relationships towards others.

The Other can be many things:

· God or the ultimate

· nature

· other human beings

· other cultures

· death, suffering, change

· rites of passage

Religion Defined

1. Religion is human involvement with what is considered to be the realm of the sacred.

sacred space, sacred time, numinous experience, mystical experience.

2. It is expressed in thought (theoretical thinking and speaking ), action (practical, acting and doing), and social forms (fellowship, community).

THEORETICAL: narrative stories and theoretical statements about reality in doctrines.

PRACTICAL: rituals, worships and ethics.

SOCIAL FORMS: Religious community carries on the tradition in groups that give the believer identity.

3. It constitutes a total system of symbols with deep meaning.

The religious map of human existence is made up of symbols= words, ideas, rituals, pictures, gestures, sounds, social groupings - that evoke the deepest feelings and most important meaning in our lives.

The various symbols fit together in a circle, for they are all related to each other in such a way as to present a comprehensive and persuasive outlook on life.

4. It is a path of ultimate transformation.

The path is a way of life, a praxis designed to restore wholeness and ultimate meaning to human existence by involvement with the source of life, the sacred.

Dualism

Dualism posits a cosmos or universe in which the Creator, God, is separate and distinct from the creation. The in-world experience is a threat or stumbling block to real experience - be it in Heaven or some other transcendent realm - will thrust believers into a pattern of using force to remake that world.

Humans are inherently sinful, fallen from the source of all being, God. Their natural desires and instincts are not to be trusted. The world is merely a testing chamber where, according to behaviour, a person is deemed fit or unfit for entrance into the realm of true reality, Heaven. The world is also the domain of an evil being, Satan, who may use the pleasures and joys of this world to tempt humans and trick them into a bond with worldly delights that will ultimately result in eternal punishment.

God made man in His image, over and above other parts of the creation, and man was called upon to have dominion over nature, to control nature. To use the land meant to live by a utilitarian standard. Simple survival was not using the land. A human being was called upon to force nature to bring forth excess. Your skill in manipulating nature and accumulating wealth was a sign that you were chosen.

Planet Earth is reduced to just a convenient battleground or stage for this divine conflict, there is not much of an impulse to respect or preserve Mother Earth's treasures.

Negative: drive to build a divine kingdom worthy of the Creator on earth

Monism

Sacred power was diffused throughout the natural world.

The passing of the seasons demands rituals in honour of the divine beings who personify Sun, Moon, Winter, Summer, Spring and Fall. Earth, fire and water need to be ritually recognized, as do the four quadrants of space and time.

You don't petition these powerful spirits; you enter into balance of harmony with them through the dimension of myth and ritual.

Animals may be sacrificed to assure that the group, tribe or clan is ritually pure. A portion of the harvest could be set aside in honour of the spirits of fertility.

Statues of totem animals. - bear, lion, eagle - could protect the home from marauding demons. In the world of primal religion, everything is alive; everything has power.

VARIETIES

· God is everything

· God is the reality or principle behind nature

· Only god is reality, all else is illusion

All varieties see all reality as ONE, whole, not divided into sacred realm and a profane or human or natural realm.

God is the ground of being and is the enlivening, creative, spark behind all that exists.

The only divine charge for human beings is to live in a harmonious relationship with the land, the plants, the animals and other human beings.

The magic of life is knowing that the divine is immanent in the Earth which, indeed, is our mother.

Negative: relieved believers of the need to create, to do, to accomplish