Religion as a Worldview

• • Integral part of human civilisation for thousands of years

  • Better understanding of human beings and their evolution

  • Shapes people’s beliefs, ethics, rituals, relationships etc

  • Dynamic → Religion has evolved just as humans have evolved

  • Religion is a read-made worldview or system of formal beliefs and structured practices that guides and directs its followers to an initial or enhanced feeling for the sacred or the divine

• Religion

  • - ‘to tie back to’ to reconnect-Religare

  • It begins with Faith - there is something to understand beyond surface appearances

  • Acknowledges that there is a supernatural dimension to life

  • Is found in all ages and cultures

  • Its ideals and values have inspired countless individuals and given motivation and direction to every human in society

• The Axial Era

  • A remarkable coincidence in the history of ideas - Middle East, China, India, Europe

  • All over the world almost simultaneously without any region knowing of the activity in other regions

  • Religious traditions secured a new depth of clarity and insight into the biggest questions of life, the universe, and everything

• Axial Period

  • Human consciousness passed over a threshold

  • Humans thought they secured a trascendent perspective beyond surface phenomena and the accidents of life

• Supernatural Dimension

  • Includes:

    • Divine revelation

    • Revealed Faith

    • Beyond human nature and any created natural reality

    • Cannot be explaied according to natural laws or occurrences

    • Exceeds the limits of ordinary human existence

    • Sometimes described as abnormal or even miraculous

  • A transcendent worldview - a reality or level of being deeper than ordinary human experience.

    • e.g. Semitic - Monotheistic - One God - God of Abraham - Judaism - Christianity - Islam

  • Latin ‘transcendere’ climb over - surpass

  • An immanent worldview - where divine powers are recognised as a constant reality - an active and continuing presence

    • e.g. Indian - the discovery of spiritual truth from within

    • immanent = No distinction between the world of the living and the world of the spirits (NOT IMMINENT)

  Characteristics of Religion

  1. A Practical and Ritual dimension, including worship and prayer

  2. An experiential and emotional dimension that is an emotive content behind ritual and prayers

  3. A narrative or mythical dimension, for instance, stories that pertain to a particular tradition such as Judaism’s use of the flood story or the Christian Garden of Eden story or a Dreaming story

  4. A doctrinal and philosophical dimension: a system of values or laws

     1. E.g: Social teachings

  5. An ethical and legal dimension: the idea that rules have to be applied to uphold both the values and understandings that a religion may offer to the world

     1. E.g: Golden Rule

  6. A social and institutional dimension, which includes the actual organisations that constitute the religion

  7. A material dimension: buildings, works of art, and so on

Australian Aboriginal Beliefs and Spiritualities

• The elders guarantee the social and religious order

• Nature of the Dreaming - Origin of the Universe

  • Supernatural origin

  • Over thousnads of years, Aboriginal people have developed an intimate connection with the environment

  • They see themselves as spiritually interconnected with the natural world

  “The whole story goes right back to the time when the ancestral heroes made laws, ceremonies and languages, gave names to things including land, rivers, mountains, animals, and so on; when everything that we can find here now was still in the process of creation.”

  • Indigenous people pass on oral stories about the past - Great Tradition of Knowledge

  • The stories explain the genesis and reveal the shaping of a formless land by great ancestors.

• Sacred Sites

  • For Aboriginal People their sacred sites are natural land formations - rivers, mountains, etc.

  • Where the Ancestral Spirits interacted with creation and in doing so based Aboriginal ‘ownership’ on their spiritual identification and association with the land

  • The Aboriginal people believe that the land has been bestowed to them by the Ancestral beings

  • They are thus responsible for the land and are obligated to care for it

  • They do this through:

    • Shared responsibilities and obligations

    • Custodial maintenance of Sacred Sites

    • Ceremonies and rituals that are performed at different times of the year

  • Rituals and Ceremonies cannot be performed by just anyone of Aboriginal descent

  • Instead, an extremely complex system of kinship exists between genders and clans

• The Dreaming

  • The Aboriginal people have a different world view

  • Their connection to the land is part of their beliefs

  • The Dreaming stories refer to the origin of a place

  • They explain how and why the landscape has a certain shape

• The nature of the Dreaming

  • The Dreaming is the underpinning of all Aboriginal culture

  • The participants in Dreaming stories were spirit ancestors, the embodiment of the first plants and animals, and natural elements, whose actions set the natural order in motion.

“The Dreaming means our identity as people. The cultural teaching and everything, that’s part of our lives here […] it’s the understanding of what we have around us.”

- Merv Penrith, Elder, 1996

• Symbolism and Art

  “There is no one word in any Aboriginal language for the term ‘art’. Art forms are viewed as an integral part of life and the celebration of life.” - Penny Tripcony, Manager, Oodgeroo Unit, Queensland University of Technology

  • The movement called Aboriginal art started in 1971, when a white teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged the men at Papunya, a settlement 240 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs, to paint a mural on a school wall

  • Aboriginal art wasn’t widely sought after until the late ‘80s. It post-dates postmodernism

• Art symbolism

  • Aboriginal people paint their ‘country’, a term that means to them much more than just landscape. Spiritual component.

  • In Aboriginal history, things don’t happen in time, they happen in place. Aboriginal artists are painting these places

• Layers of Meanings

  • Many Aboriginal paintings have several layers of meaning:

  “The outer layers might be appreciated by people who recognise them as animals, hunting guides, or creation stories, … Then there might be a significance that only the initiated can appreciate, then a final layer that only can be understood by the artists themselves, or senior law-men.” - Keith Munro, an Aboriginal art curator

• Indigenous Australian Knowledges

  • Symbolism and art play a significant role in Australian Aboriginal spiritualities

  • Spirituality in Aboriginal contexts encompasses knowledges that have shaped ways of being and wellbeing since long before colonisation

  • These ways of knowing have been demeaned and devalued over time but remain integral to Aboriginal cultural and spiritual practices

• Visual Symbols and Cultural Content

  • Aboriginal symbols are not merely artistic expressions; they represent cultural intellect

  • Recent research suggests that these symbols have the ability to connect external and internal worlds through the unconscious mind

  • These unique visual literacies hold immense value and have been respected and appreciated for thousands of years

• Astronomical Symbolism

  • Aboriginal rock art also reflects astronomical traditions

  • Plausible examples of depictions of astronomical figures and symbols exist, indicating that Aboriginal Australians used astronomical observations to create stone arrangements

• Obligation to the land

  • Each family is attached to a landowning clan-obligation to manage and nurture

  • It has boundaries - rivers, any landform

  • Through kinship relations, marriage, and other agreements, people moved beyond their own estates to forage according to the seasons

  • Aboriginal people invested the land with stories and formed a holistic relationship with it

  • The great ancestors shaped the land and were embedded in it