Religions, Religious Experience and Spirituality Notes

Diversity in Religions

The best approach to accepting religious diversity involves educating oneself about various religions.

What is Religion?

Religion encompasses practices rooted in highly valued or sacred beliefs and teachings.
It includes any practice to which an individual or group is seriously devoted.
Religion acts as an institution for expressing belief in a divine power.

Classifying Religious Beliefs

Monotheistic: Belief in a single god.
Polytheistic: Belief in multiple gods.
Atheistic: Disbelief in any god.

Secular and Agnostic Views

Secularism and agnosticism represent viewpoints rather than formal religions.
They reflect an individual's thoughts on religion, irrespective of their religious affiliation.
People of various religious and non-religious backgrounds may share secular views.

Secularism

Secularity advocates for the separation of government and other entities from religion and religious beliefs.
It supports freedom from religious rule and teachings.
GOVERNMENT ⇦/--> RELIGION (Illustrates the desired separation)

Agnosticism

Derived from the Greek word "agnostos," meaning "to not know."
Agnosticism is the view that the existence or nature of something is unknown or unknowable, often concerning religion and deities.
Individuals may practice a religion while maintaining skepticism about certain aspects of it, which constitutes a form of agnosticism.

Defining Religion

Religion is a universal aspect of human experience.
Central questions include: Why are humans religious? What is religion?
Definitions can be substantive (defining what religion is) or functional (defining what religion does).

Sample Definitions of Religion

Paul Tillich: Religion involves being grasped by an ultimate concern that supersedes all other concerns and provides the answer to life's meaning.
J.C. Livingston: Religion is a system of activities and beliefs directed towards what is perceived as sacred and transformative.
F. Schleiermacher: The essence of religion lies in the feeling of absolute dependence.
Rudolf Otto: Religion grows out of and expresses the experience of the holy in its various aspects.
Mark Pusley: Religion is a set of beliefs and practices offering answers to fundamental questions about human existence through supernatural forces, realities, or principles.

Axial Age Religion

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices aimed at transforming human beings from their unsatisfactory natural condition to conform with an ultimate reality (based on John Hick’s, An Interpretation of Religion).
Pre-axial religion (ancient religion): tribal, national religions. Ritual and sacrifice used to win divine favor. Religion brings stability to the group.
Axial Age (900 – 200BCE): transition from tribal religions to world religions – with a new emphasis on personal salvation. Religion brings a personal experience.

Pre-Axial Religion

Pre-axial religion is world-accepting, focused on preserving the cosmic and social order.
It provides a mythical framework for bestowing meaning on the basic realities of life: survival, reproduction, social cohesion.
The aim of pre-axial religion is to promote the stability of the tribe in an uncertain natural environment.
Robert Bellah: In the first millennium B.C. across the Old World, there occurred a religious rejection of the world, characterized by a negative evaluation of reality, considering another realm as alone true and infinitely valuable. Salvation became the central religious preoccupation.

The Axial Age

During the Axial Age, humans were viewed as capable of salvation, not just as members of a tribe or clan.
John Hick: In the Axial Age, the human mind became conscious of itself as a distinct reality with its own possibilities, standing back from its environment. The idea of a limitlessly better possibility emerged.

Why Study Religion?

To understand our nature.
To overcome our ignorance.
To comprehend our culture.
To achieve a global perspective.
To help formulate our own religious outlook or philosophy of life.
Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Nietzsche: "Real courage is not the courage of our convictions but the courage to examine our convictions."

Responses to Religious Diversity

Conflicting claims among religious traditions regarding Ultimate Reality, human origins and destiny, and historical events raise the question of how to interpret these accounts.

Exclusivism

Exclusivism asserts that only one religion is correct.
Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (Outside the Church there is no salvation).
Epistemological Problem: How does one know that a particular religion is the one and correct path to God or Ultimate Reality?
Moral Problem: It seems unfair for Ultimate Reality to single out a particular culture as specially favored while commending the mass of humanity to perdition or ignorance.

Inclusivism

Inclusivism posits that one religion is fully correct, while others are partially correct.
The "seeds of truth" present and active in various religious traditions reflect the unique Word of God, who enlightens every man coming into the world (cf. Jn. 1:9). They are together an “effect of the Spirit of truth operating outside the visible confines of the Mystical Body” and which ‘blows where it wills (Jn.3:8).
Helps resolve the moral, but not the epistemological problem.
Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, 16: "Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.”

Subjectivism and Relativism

Subjectivism: Each religion is correct for the individuals who adhere to it.
D.Z Phillips: The meaning of religious language can only be understood by observing how it functions in a religious community.
Relativism: The correctness of a religion is relative to the world view of its adherents. Claims about reality are relative to particular societies.
J.Runzo: There are mutually incompatible yet individually adequate sets of conceptual- schema-relative truths.

Salvation

Salvation: The transformation of individuals from self-centeredness to reality-centeredness, from selfish egoists to compassionate golden rule followers.
Each tradition conceptualizes the wrongness of human existence: fallenness from paradisal virtue, moral weakness and alienation from God, fragmentation of the infinite one into false individualities, or self-centeredness which poisons our involvement in the world process, making it an experience of anxious unhappy unfulfillment.

Salvation/Liberation: Common Themes in Diverse Traditions

Ordinary human existence is unsatisfactory. (yetzer ha-ra - Judaism; fallen - Christianity; ghafala - Islam, avidya - Hinduism; Dukkha - Buddhism).
Salvation as a transformation from self-centeredness to Reality centeredness.
Kabir: "When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done."
The Buddha: "Thinking on there being no self, he wins to the state wherein the conceit “I am” has been uprooted, to nirvana, even in this life."
Radhakishnan: "We must give up our particular will, die to our ego, by surrendering its whole nature …to the divine."

Naturalism

Naturalism claims that the supernaturalistic explanations of the origin and destiny of the universe found in religion are remnants of a pre-scientific culture. The empirical methods of scientific inquiry find no evidence for the reality of supernatural forces. Naturalistic explanations (e.g., evolution, big bang) provide more adequate descriptions of material and biological phenomena. Therefore, the naturalist suspects that all religions are mistaken.

From Deism to Naturalism

Geocentrism to Heliocentrism – end of the three-story universe. Naturalistic explanations of natural phenomena (weather, Historical development, consciousness, origin of the universe) eliminated the role of an interventionist deity.
Stephen W. Hawking: "But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would be neither created nor destroyed. It would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"
Richard Dawkins: "The Universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."