THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF PLANET EARTH

The Religious Life of Planet Earth

The Religious Life of Planet Earth

The criteria I will employ to determine if people on earth are religious is that how many people attach themselves to any religion and attend their religious meetings. Religious life all through the earth, despite the exact belief, shows both communal-social and personal-psychological aspects. Certainly, people within the miscellaneous religious customs of the earth observe the sacred aspect of their devotion as transcending both the emotional and individual psychological with the social and corporate features of their devotion's appearances.

The examples of behaviors or beliefs I observe related to the criteria I established to know if people on earth are religious are the classification of religions on the basis of theology & doctrines, ethics, institutions and myth & rituals.

Myth And Ritual

Formative religious experiences contain within them impulses to expression (myth) and re-creation (ritual) that later become routinized and then institutionalized. Core myths and rituals, therefore, attempt to convey and re-create the experience of the founder or religious community. Both myths and rituals rely on symbols whose content must be shared in order for them to have meaning for the religious group that uses them. Symbols have not only shared cognitive meanings but also common emotional significance and value. That is, symbols do not simply convey intellectual understanding but also engender an emotive response. Furthermore, religious symbols are integrative and transforming agents in that they point to realities that have been encountered but are hidden from everyday vision and experience. (Durkheim, 2005)

Ethics

It appears that all religious traditions evidence an interdependent and necessary relationship of conduct to experience so that what is experienced as an ecstatic encounter with the divine is expressed as a new and integrated mode of living. The committed ethical life of a devotee, ...