Religious studies midterm 1 real study

World Religions model

Also known as World Religions Paradigm

It defines the 10 main world religions(unique beliefs/perspectives)

• doesn’t take account that many of them overlap

• This list is based upon hierarchy of which religion is “better”

• Assumes a religion doesn’t change with time

Scholars argue that this list is inherently based on a classification framework that uses protestant christianity as a baseline.

• these religions have a scripture, founder, creed(Christianity)

Thomas Broughton(1742)

He wants to save Christianity in a moment of crisis(enlightenment)

• tries to use logic and reasoning to justify his belief

Writes the dictionary

• Classifies religion into categories(True/false, ancient/modern, pagan, idolatry)

  • shows the need for classification, comparison, and hierarchy

• Says there only 4 religions(Christianity, islam, Judaism, paganism)

Edward Tylor

Offers a theory of religion comes from:

• Because everything has a soul(Animism), God must be real

  • Animism(everything has a soul because of dream projections)

  • People tried to rationalize the world around them through religion

• Tries to explain origin of religion through logic and reasoning rather than experience

Writes “primitive culture”

• he thinks that primitive ppl through plants have souls, because they experience life and death, primitive ppl projected the soul onto them

James Frazer

Created a theory of origin of religion

• came from inability to manipulate magic, “since we can’t, someone else can”

• Magic —> Religion —> science(linear progression supposedly)

Writes ‘The Golden Borough”

• hints that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is just a myth.

Tylor and Frazer

Both assumed that humanity follows a progression(Savagery —> Barbarism —> Civilization)

• religion evolves alongside this progression

• assumes that modern people are “better” than the savage/barbaric past ppl

Scala Naturae

Idea that existence is in a hierachy

• God → angels → humans → animals → plants → minerals

• example of hierarchy

Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man”

Explains the idea of evolution

• evolution shows that humans aren’t created first(goes against Scala naturae)

• Pushes back against genesis account of history

Ethnographic upstreaming / primitive

Looking at something modern and “upstreaming”(tracing it back) to its origin to try to understand the origin

• Tylor and Frazer did this with their theories

  • it assumes that primitive ppl were all the same back then and they haven’t changed over time.

Raffaele Pettazzoni

Tries to move beyond origin of religion(tries to understand religion)

• Every religion has central character, salvation, universal etc

• again shows need to classify religion then comparison

• Talks about difference between Christianity and other religions(Christianity kicked every other religion out vs other’s syncretized)

Mircea Eliade

“The Sacred and Profane”

Says there something “sacred” in religion and thats why people believe in it

• sacred = ultimate reality, purpose, power, meaning

sui generis(religion has its own unique irreducible thing); it cannot be explained away

Hierophany(the sacred manifesting itself in whatever it wants to)

Homo Religiosus(humans have this intrinsic desire for the “sacred”/purpoese/God)

He thinks you can’t understand religion through logic and reasoning but through experience.

In the “archaic” world people were much more in tune with the sacred but the “modern” person is not as much

Rudolf Otto

“Das Heilige, The Idea of the Holy”

Science doesn’t have explanatory power, must rely on intuition to understand religion

• beyond logic and reasoning

Eliade relies heavily on him.

Carl Jung

psychologist

Collective consciousness(humanity is connected through “collective consciousness” which causes archetypes/patterns to form all throughout history.)

Also says that all addiction is a low level search for God.

Inspires Eliade in his theory of religion

Eliade vs Tylor/Frazer

For Tylor and Frazer religion was used to explain the world around them(give hope for the next life)

For Eliade, religion is to discover the sacred

Orientalism

The West’s way of imagining and representing “the East” as its inferior Other, tied to colonial power.

Key ideas:

• Knowledge = power (Foucault); scholarship justified empire

• The “Orient” is a Western construction, a mirror for Europe

• Two faces: negative (backward) and romantic (“mystic East”). Both essentialize.

Religion connection:

• Helped construct “Hinduism” and “Buddhism” as -isms

• Textual bias: scriptures over lived practice (Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East)

• Links to the World Religions model, Masuzawa, Tylor/Frazer (colonial data), and Eliade (timeless “archaic”)

Edward Said’s theory of orientalist

Said(Dogmas)

• Absolute systematic difference between the West(rationality, development, humane, superior)

• Abstractions about the Orient(Westerns prefer to study the ancient Orient rather than the modern one)

• Orient is eternal, uniform, incapable of defining itself

• The Orient is something to be feared or controlled whenever possible

Orientals were rarely seen or looked at, they were seen “through”, “analyzed”, not as people but as problems to be solved , confined or taken over.

Max Muller

Writes the “Sacred Books of the East”