RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD

Religions of the World

Religions of the World

Introduction

Modern study of religion is largely a product of techniques of scholarship developed in the 19th century. The use of historical, archaeological, and philological methods led to a new range of explorations into the ancient past of religion. The advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory and other factors increased interest in the problem of the origins of religion (Spilka, 2003). Sometimes attempts at a "scientific" account of religious origins have been in conflict with traditional religious views, especially because the new methods seemed to be a challenge to the literal accuracy of the Bible. Most scholars today think that the Bible stands up well as a historical source, though its conceptual framework, being ancient, diverges from present-day views (Armstrong, 2003).

Much attention has been paid by sociologists and others to projectionist and functionalist accounts of religion—that is, theories holding that religion arises from externalizing social and psychological values and thus helps to keep a society together. For the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, religion, morals, and society constitute a triangle of forces in which the gods are in effect social values given concrete shape (James, 2004). A parallel theory is the Austrian Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic hypothesis about the origin of the father figure in religion, where God in effect is projected out of infantile experience through the mechanism of repression and the unconscious. Though this theory is based on inadequate historical evidence, it has been influential, partly because it explains some modern religious attitudes (Eliade, 2000).

By contrast, the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung took seriously the comparative study of religion. He evolved from his examination of Eastern and Western mythologies a theory of archetypes, or recurring patterns of myth and symbolism manifested in both art and dreams (Armstrong, 2003). A somewhat similar examination of recurring motifs of religious symbolism is found in the writings of the Romanian-born scholar Mircea Eliade. What is unclear in such accounts is this: Given that patterns of religious experience and symbolism exist, what is their origin? Are they primal human creations worked out in different ways in different cultures? In what sense can they be seen as revelatory of some Ultimate?

1. Buddhism

Buddhism was divided broadly between the Lesser Vehicle, now represented by Theravada, in South and Southeast Asia, and the Greater Vehicle, or Mahayana, in the Far East. Mahayana was subdivided into a number of sects ranging from Pure Land, which stressed bhakti, or devotion to a personal Being (the Buddha Amitabha, or Amida), to Ch'an (Zen), which was an original restatement of the meditational aspect of early Buddhism. Each of these sects had a somewhat different character in its Chinese and Japanese forms. In 20th century Japan there is a range of modernizing movements, such as Soka Gakkai, which blends the older Buddhism expressed by the 13th century monk Nichiren with elements of modern Western ethics and educational theory. Still a third major branch of Buddhism is Vajrayana, or the Diamond Vehicle, also called Mantrayana (Spilka, ...