Religion exam 2

Anthropology and Sociology

Kant → modern sensibility (what is that we can know) = our perceptual field

A Priori: what we come to know → god doesnt exsist in this space/time

Textbook:

Franz Boaz → Father of American cultural anthropology

• Culture = a malleable and dynamic category

Malinowski→ Participant Observation

• Understanding the native value of culture

  • Patterns + interpreting and theorizing for data collection

Categories are created for our convenience, but humans arent units in a category.

• Human mind is the creator of categories

Cultures: sometimes seen as elusive → binds societies together

Transition from Stage 1 (Philosophy and Theology) to Stage 2 (Social Sciences and History)

Who were the figures?

Bridge moving from Transcendence to Immanence

The Bridge: Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx

What is Immanence?

Cancentrated forms of knowlage: exsisting or operating within constructs

• what we can know

Trancendance: What we cant know

GWF Hagel

After Kant

• Subjectivist → Robust understanding of science without religion (which was believed to be wrong)

• Objectivist: What you can know (Kant)

  • Subject the knowledge and separate religion

Want to know the totality of reality: Poetry/religion etc can’t be exculusd excluded

Hagel: Everything → Holistic perspective of reality, brought religion back into the picture

• He collapses Kant’s “convenient” two-world hypothesis

  (noumena/phenomenal) collapsing the Kantian divide between the phenomenal (observable) and the noumenal (the "thing-in-itself"), arguing that reality is a totality of forces where the divine essence is active within history

• History = a long process in which the Absolute moves from thing to thing

God = reality

Philosophy as a main focus — connects subjective with objective — totality of reality

• Reflects Aristotle

The 3 Motifs of Enlightenment Reas

1) An epistemic concern for autonomous human reason

• independent thinking, anticlearism

2) A political concern for religious tolerance

3) An anti-clericalism designed to deny religious institutions (the Church)

epistemic and political authority

• things have to change with the material things of human nature

Ludwig Feuerbach

Projection Theory

• "God" is merely a projection of human nature onto an imaginary "screen of heaven"

“The secret of theology is anthropology” (Feuerbach)

Feuerbach took this logic to its ultimate conclusion: he asserted that there is no distinct "Absolute" and that God and Humanity are identical

Alienation → religion confuses the idea of God with humanity)

• Takes away from the absolute truth

• Humans confused their own reality with the idea of God

“Reconciliation” (true knowledge) happens when we recognize that humanity belongs in the place previously occupied by God

Karl Marx - Offical sign of the shift

Built upon Feuerbach’s premise that "Man makes religion, religion does not make man,"

• Critiqued that he treated “humanity” as an abstract philosophical concept

Society and human relations are what matter

• How religion is used in that — rather than what it teaches

Connected the study of religion to historical materialism

• religion as an "inverted consciousness" or a superstructure

  • that legitimates class struggle and provides "otherworldly" consolation for the alienated proletariat

Religion’s Functions: Ideas (supernatural) that shapes the world

• Soceity is devided → class divisions

• religion serves both classes

“Labour-theory of value”

The bourgeoisie exploits the surplus value of the proletariat by profiting from the work. ForMarx, it’s theft of the proletariat’s productivity, leading to the crime of the bourgeoisie and the justified revolutionary counteraction of the proletariat

Anthrobolofy and Sociology (Background)

Marx: Theology and philosophy are a product of “Inverted consiousness”

• Offer the view that reality is consituted by ideas and not “Actually” by material and social forces

Alienation and Reconciliation

• Feuerbach: religion confuses the idea of God withHuman reality (= alienation). True knowledge consists in placing Humanity in the place ofGod (= reconciliation)

• Marx: religion legitimates a class struggle between the ruling class (bourgeois) and the working class (proletariat) by being resigned to an otherworldlysituation (= alienation).

True knowledge consists in a changed situation, overthrowing the capitalist economic system that uses religion toreinforce the capitalist status quo (= reconciliation):

• Hence: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach,XI)

• This marks the shift from classical theology and philosophy to classical anthropology and sociology, from philosophy and theology as the means by which religion is to be explained.

It also marks the culminating movement of the process from transcendence to immanence

explains why early sociology and anthropology

felt that a scientific explanation of religion should focuson:

• the human, not the divine—in some cases: the human as“divine”

• the importance of material (“empirical”) explanations of religion, not

speculation (i.e. philosophy and theology)

• This background also explains why early sociology and

anthropology adopted a pejorative attitude toward religion (“the

criticism of religion”)

Approaches

Evolutionist

• Marx, Durkhim, Tylor, Muller, Frazer

Functionalist

• Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard

Interpretive

• Geertz

Structuralist

• Lévi-Strauss, Turner

Reductionism

Infinite = Projection of finite : what humans value

• Doing it for the purpose of understanding human reality

• Understading reality through humans

Evelutionist - Classical Anthropology

• Early theorists were thus enamored by a quest for the

origins of religion. Basic assumption: By discovering

religion in primal form, we could track developments in

terms of stages of ascendancy, supremacy

Marx and Feuerbach

• Religion in its primal forms was not correct in the path of cultural progresses → its rootes were not well founded

Durkheim

• Interested in Society → “All religions are true.”

  • Religions are true about human orientations in the world

  • Religions exist in humans - a uniting factor

• Self-consciousness

• Religion = social function social

Religion = unit to understanding communities

• Social functions, not in its transcendental statements

• Moral concept of society

Evelutionist - Classical Sociologists

Max Weber → Historian (evolutionist trend)

• Exeption to the eculitionist trend

• Understanding religion is an important means of understanding global economy

  • Economy defines day to day world (trancendance)

• History becomes meaningful

• Religion is a catalyst for the proliferation of modern capitalism

Evolutionism: Animism

Key Figure: E.B. Tylor proposed "animism" (the belief that spirits animate the world) as the earliest form of religious thinking