Thread: What is religion for? Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
Or what does it do that other aspects of culture don't?

AFAIK, every culture or society we’ve known or guessed anything about has produced some sort of religious practice or belief (or several) which gets dispersed among groups of adherents. (I’d like to exclude from this discussion purely individual or idiosyncratic religious notions, though I suppose one could argue they all are to some extent.)

It’s easy enough to explain religion as a means for humanity to explain what it doesn’t (yet) understand of its environment, or as a psychological coping mechanism for dealing with the assorted ills and disasters humans are faced with, etc. There’s also the role which religion plays in forming group identities (for good or ill) in a social species, and the additional social control element (since as far as I know, all religions tend to promulgate “rules for living”).

For me, though, these explanations don’t cut much mustard. Most of us eventually understand these meta-role explanations which religious belief/practice plays in our lives, and I suspect that this has likely always been true. Yet religious belief / practice remains widespread. What’s more, it’s unique in positing the existence of one or more invisible figures with various degrees of authority or control over the human condition.

After all, various other social mechanisms can meet human needs for explanations of what we don’t understand (i.e., sciences), for coping with human tragedy (i.e., friendship, psychological counseling), for social control (i.e., the law, ethics, philosophy); for some self-transcendent group identity (i.e., nationalism or political groups or clans). Yet religious belief / practice remains widespread, and for many, profound and even essential.

What makes religion (and its adjunct acceptance of one or more deities) so apparently necessary to the human condition?

[ 14. April 2014, 14:16: Message edited by: Porridge ]
 
Posted by Raptor Eye (# 16649) on :
 
Religion is the human way of organising our attempts to make sense of our connection with God, incorporate God's will as imparted to us into our lives, and most importantly to find ways of communally and individually engaging with God.
 
Posted by Evensong (# 14696) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Porridge:
What makes religion (and its adjunct acceptance of one or more deities) so apparently necessary to the human condition?
God
 
Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :
 
But these explanations beg the question (in the classical sense of that phrase):

Q. Why do we feel the need to explain the unexplainable by creating a God?

A. Because God exists.
 
Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :
 
Here is Emile Durkheim's classic "functionalist" view, which sees religion more in terms of a cohesive force binding society together. The loss of religion leads to the fragmentation of society and individual "anomie".

Compare this with the highly individualistic and needs-based theory of Stark and Bainbridge, which I think could only have been devised by Americans in thrall to market forces!
 
Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :
 
Some of the purposes of religion discussed came about in different stages of human history. Explaining natural phenomena we did not understand (and trying to control or appease those phenomena) is probably as old as human language in the earliest hunter-gatherer societies. Religion as an instrument of social control came about with the beginnings of social stratification in agricultural city-dwelling societies.

So when you ask about the purpose of religion, do you mean any belief in the supernatural or do you mean "organized religion"?

Following the scientific revolution, the secularization of most of government and much of society, etc., a belief in the supernatural persists in many products of consumer culture. Organized religion helps different ethnic groups maintain their cultural identity in a multiethnic society and helps give underprivileged groups a source of pride and solidarity in opposition to what they perceive as the secularism of the elites.

For me, religion helps me feel better about all of my shortcomings and all the failures I have had in life. I know it isn't an excuse to not try to be better and it doesn't mean that I don't have to make amends for the wrong I have done - and I know that religion may all be wrong so I shouldn't deny myself any happiness in this life because of it. But religion seems to be a source of irrational hope in spite of all evidence to the contrary that comforts me. You can also get this from a more free-form spirituality and even from secular philosophies and some things we have learned from psychology. However, religion helps me because

a. you don't have to worry about scientific evidence coming along to disprove it - all the important religious beliefs I have are almost completely unfalsifiable in this life

b. I don't feel alone in the beliefs that comfort me because many people in many places and in many periods of history have shared these beliefs - maybe not in the same way I do, but in some way.

c. Communal worship helps me to get out of both my selfish desires and my rational mind and just contemplate something mysterious, transcendent, awesome, and yet also good, loving, and intimate. Doing this in the context of organized religion helps me to feel part of a larger movement that finds this irrationality useful and keeps me from worrying about being caught in my own personal delusion or about being duped by the latest spiritual salesman (traditional religions are prevented by their own rules (and by competing bases of power - even in the RCC and other hierarchical organizations) from becoming too mercenary or cultish - although scams and crazy cults do exist as substreams within traditional religions.
 
Posted by HCH (# 14313) on :
 
I think any proper answer to this question has to apply to religion in general and not just to some religions. It requires an answer to "what is a religion?", which is a difficult question.

Do we have an anthropologist aboard?
 
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on :
 
What is religion for ?

Is it to provide people such as myself some flotsam and jetsam to cling to in the seeming incredible, and unexplainable purpose of existence ?
Or maybe it's simply a means of controlling people .

I don't mean control in a necessarily negative way . Many groups of people around the world are quite happy to be controlled by religion.
Besides which most of us are subliminally controlled by our desires one way or another, even in the absence of any formal religion.

I suppose a follow up question might be, would the world be better place without any kind of religion at all .
 
Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:
Originally posted by Porridge:
What makes religion (and its adjunct acceptance of one or more deities) so apparently necessary to the human condition?
God
So polytheists accept multiple deities because a God or the Gods exist or a God or the Gods want them too? Which is it, God or Gods?
 
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:
Originally posted by Porridge:
What makes religion (and its adjunct acceptance of one or more deities) so apparently necessary to the human condition?
God
Exactly

Every culture has religion because every culture experiences the Divine. Religion is just the cultural-linguistic attempts to make sense of those experiences. The question is if all religions are equal. One's answer to that depends largely on one's own belief about one's religion.
 
Posted by Desert Daughter (# 13635) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Palimpsest:
[So polytheists accept multiple deities because a God or the Gods exist or a God or the Gods want them too? Which is it, God or Gods?
Depends. Many people (in India, for example) would argue that polytheism ism't really that at all in most cases- it is just that The Godhead is expressed, visioned, and revered, under many different forms and manifestations.
As to "real" polytheists, I'd say replace "God" by "The Divine".

But generally, I think Evensong is spot on. God is love, and humans are capable of responding to that love (most of them,anyway).
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
It requires an answer to "what is a religion?", which is a difficult question.
Yes.
I don't think there is any general phenomenon that can be called 'religion', of which 'religions' are specific instances. 'Religion' I believe is a term applied by Western anthropologists and theologians who are assimilating social practices and metaphysical beliefs of other cultures to the role and position of Christianity in Enlightenment Europe.

Some activities that are part of 'religion' are about stabilising society and resolving conflicts. Others are about criticising society. Others are about maintaining human individual personality outside of society. There isn't a single function that is common to everything that is normally called 'religion' but is not shared with anything not normally called 'religion'.

There is no one single purpose that is served in one society by Aztec human sacrifice and in another society by Sufi mysticism.
 
Posted by Desert Daughter (# 13635) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There is no one single purpose that is served in one society by Aztec human sacrifice and in another society by Sufi mysticism.
Unconditional submission to The Godhead? Expressions of unconditional love? Transcending the otherwise incomprehensible?
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Desert Daughter:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There is no one single purpose that is served in one society by Aztec human sacrifice and in another society by Sufi mysticism.
Unconditional submission to The Godhead? Expressions of unconditional love? Transcending the otherwise incomprehensible?
I'm not quite seeing how Aztec human sacrifice is an expression of unconditional love. Nor am I seeing how feeding the gods blood so they can keep the sun alive is an unconditional submission to the Godhead. It's done on condition that the sun can't manage on its own.
 
Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
It requires an answer to "what is a religion?", which is a difficult question.
Yes.
I don't think there is any general phenomenon that can be called 'religion', of which 'religions' are specific instances.
Interesting; I've been operating off an assumption that there is. Am I mistaken, or am I encountering an effort to partition 'religion' off from the One True Faith? Maybe it is in fact necessary to define 'religion.' And no, that's not easy to pin down. Well, I'll give it a whack (understand that I'm not a scholar of religion or anything else):

I've read a little about belief systems outside of the Monotheistic Big Three as well as a bit about those, and here's what I think "religions" have in common:

1. There's a metaphysical component.

Whether you believe every pebble, plant, and animal you see is imbued with some sort of individual 'spirit,' or whether you believe in a single all-powerful deity, there's an element of the unseen & unknown -- something which operates beyond the reality known to five workaday human senses & human powers.

2. There's a component which involves group participation in practices, rituals, or behaviors associated solely or at least primarily with the belief system.

Whether you burn fires all night at the solstice, or chant specified words at certain times, or eat sanctified wafers, or toss virgins into volcanoes, there are actions one performs with a group which are intended either to alter ordinary consciousness or to connect one somehow with the metaphysical element in # 1 (or both of the above).

3. There's a component which involves specifying either certain selected human participants, or at least certain selected conditions or occasions in which any human participant, might be recognizable to other participants as having a special or more pronounced connection (either permanent or temporary) to the metaphysical element in # 1.

Whether you're born with a caul, and hence marked as tribal shaman, or you undertook a 120-credit graduate degree in divinity, or you were 'called' by your group, or you were 'visited' in a trance with glossolalia or ecstatic/prophetic revelations, there are 'signs' of some special, possibly intermediary, connection between specified participants & the metaphysical on a permanent basis, or between any participant (or several of them) on an occasional basis.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
'Religion' I believe is a term applied by Western anthropologists and theologians who are assimilating social practices and metaphysical beliefs of other cultures to the role and position of Christianity in Enlightenment Europe.
Not sure I follow; by 'assimilating,' are you saying the anthros & theologs are claiming an equal status for non-Christian, non-Western beliefs & practices?

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Some activities that are part of 'religion' are about stabilising society and resolving conflicts. Others are about criticising society. Others are about maintaining human individual personality outside of society.
I'm not grasping what you mean by the last sentence here.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There isn't a single function that is common to everything that is normally called 'religion' but is not shared with anything not normally called 'religion'.
Where do we find the metaphysical outside of 'religion?'

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There is no one single purpose that is served in one society by Aztec human sacrifice and in another society by Sufi mysticism.
I wonder; if this is true, then how is it that 'religion' continues to involve so many people?
 
Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :
 
I have no expertise in this area, but what I've heard is that in African societies there was originally no concept of 'religion' as some distinct aspect of life or culture. It was simply part of everything.

I think some commentators might argue that any division between the sacred and the profane is inherently secularising, because it puts religion in the position of always having to explain and justify itself, rather than being something natural and self-evident. This seems to be a particular problem for Christianity. (Maybe it's also an advantage, to the extent that many Christians are willing to compartmentalise their lives, with one compartment labelled for 'religion'. It's a compartment that can be as big or as small as you like, and is hence rather user-friendly and adaptable....)
 
Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Desert Daughter:
But generally, I think Evensong is spot on. God is love, and humans are capable of responding to that love (most of them,anyway).
God is a feeling?
 
Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
quote:
Originally posted by Desert Daughter:
But generally, I think Evensong is spot on. God is love, and humans are capable of responding to that love (most of them,anyway).
God is a feeling?
You've probably heard this before, but the original Greek in the New Testament says that God is "Agape," which can be translated as "charity," "unconditional love," or, as Wikipedia quotes Thomas Jay Oord, "an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being." I would translate it as saying that God is "giving for no personal benefit whatsoever" or "pure other-concernedness."
 
Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
We have, perhaps predictably and understandably, promptly wandered off of 'religion' to 'God.'

I think part of what I'm trying to unearth (as one who isn't a believer) is this: how and from where within the human psyche, do humans get the impulse to suppose there is not only 'something more, something bigger, something evanescent, inexplicable, I'm-running-out-of-adjectives-here,' but also 'something requiring a response' -- appeasement, adoration, terror, contemplation, you-name-it -- from us?

Here's what I'm imagining: a cave-clan. Somehow, somewhere, one of them fashioned the first Willendorf Venus, or painted the first aurochs by torchlight in the black depths of a cave at Lascaux or somewhere, or uttered the first loud plea for rain to make the fiddleheads grow and restore the handy little spring near their cave.

Where and how did this impulse, this first notion -- that there was a force beyond her/himself to make more babies arrive, to bring success to the hunt, to grant or withhold the spring rains -- emerge? Having emerged, how has it maintained its enormous power over the milennia?
 
Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :
 
As a non-believer, I'd look for an explanation in the nature of the people who worship. I think we've seen believers seem to explain it in terms of the object of their belief.

As a non-believer, I think most of us are born into a world where there is a mother who controls our world, feeds us and communicates with us. So we have that model to hand when given the mysteries of nature.

To get to religion, I've seen some loose theories that a religion tends to form in social groups larger than a family and enables the groups to function better. Having multiple power hierarchies may prevent the excesses of a single totally powerful ruler. I find this interesting, but these evolutionary valuable theories do seem to have a "just-so" story quality to them.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Porridge:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I don't think there is any general phenomenon that can be called 'religion', of which 'religions' are specific instances.
I've read a little about belief systems outside of the Monotheistic Big Three as well as a bit about those, and here's what I think "religions" have in common:

1. There's a metaphysical component.
Counterexample: at least some versions of Buddhism claim to have no metaphysical component.

Counterexample: things like Platonism and Schopenhauer's philosophy have a metaphysical component but aren't commonly considered 'religion'.
The second I hope makes it clearer where I'm coming from: there are a lot of Western philosophies that don't count as 'religion' that would be considered 'religion' if non-Westerners did them. This suggests that 'religion' is being defined in such a way as to privilege Western ideas.

quote:
2. There's a component which involves group participation in practices, rituals, or behaviors associated solely or at least primarily with the belief system.
Again, some forms of Buddhism are short on group rituals. Some practices of living as a hermit in Hinduism would mean exclusion from group rituals too.
Again, there are Western practices that don't count as religion that involve group participation.

I think one could define religion as, say, spirituality with communally prescribed ritual expressions. But one would have to be prepared to leave some things that have historically been called religion out and put some other things in.

quote:
3. There's a component which involves specifying either certain selected human participants, or at least certain selected conditions or occasions in which any human participant, might be recognizable to other participants as having a special or more pronounced connection (either permanent or temporary) to the metaphysical element in # 1.
Quakers are a counterexample here, obviously.
Also, pop concerts.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
'Religion' I believe is a term applied by Western anthropologists and theologians who are assimilating social practices and metaphysical beliefs of other cultures to the role and position of Christianity in Enlightenment Europe.
Not sure I follow; by 'assimilating,' are you saying the anthros & theologs are claiming an equal status for non-Christian, non-Western beliefs & practices?
Not exactly. They define the essential functions of religion as the functions of liberal Protestantism or Enlightenment deism. They then rank religions according to the degree to which they perform those essential functions. By strange coincidence liberal Protestantism turns out to be the best religion. Everything else they've defined as 'religion' turns out to be a deficient and corrupt form of liberal Protestantism.

No attempt is made to understand what is going on in the participants' terms: rather the Westerners' understanding is imposed upon the foreign practice.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Some activities that are part of 'religion' are about stabilising society and resolving conflicts. Others are about criticising society. Others are about maintaining human individual personality outside of society.
I'm not grasping what you mean by the last sentence here.
I'm thinking about things like solitary meditation: activities that seem to be about developing the individual's own spiritual state without any reference to a wider society.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There isn't a single function that is common to everything that is normally called 'religion' but is not shared with anything not normally called 'religion'.
Where do we find the metaphysical outside of 'religion?'
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
There is no one single purpose that is served in one society by Aztec human sacrifice and in another society by Sufi mysticism.
I wonder; if this is true, then how is it that 'religion' continues to involve so many people?
Just because religions have no single common purpose shared by all religions and not by anything else doesn't mean that they don't have any purposes. Saying that they must have something in common or they wouldn't involve so many people is like saying that all successful movies must have the same plot elements or they wouldn't be successful.
 
Posted by IconiumBound (# 754) on :
 
Try this: All religions are codified moral codes that believers are given to obey with appropriate rewards or punishments.
 
Posted by Galilit (# 16470) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
I have no expertise in this area, but what I've heard is that in African societies there was originally no concept of 'religion' as some distinct aspect of life or culture. It was simply part of everything.
Perople tell me this is how it is in (on) Bali. Fully a third of people's day is taken up with reigious pursuits - making little offering thingies all wrapped up with leaves and flowers, taking them to the Appropriate Place, preparing for tomorrow's obligations, actual prayers, etc.
 
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :
 
Porridge, as one who has declared yourself to be a non-believer, you probably won't accept this. But in asking your question, inevitable, those of us who are believers and those who are not, will be speaking completely at cross purposes.

For those of us who believe, Evensong's simple answer cannot be bettered. It isn't a question of 'what is religion for?' As a question, I'm not sure it even makes sense. It's certainly looking though the telescope from the wrong end.

God is. Religion is about God. He made us. We are here to serve him. He is not there to meet our needs. To put it in a different way, theologically we live in a post Copernican solar system. We orbit him. He doesn't orbit us. We are not the centre of everything. He judges us and we are evaluated by reference to him, not the other way round.

The Shorter Westminster Confession,
quote:
Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
St Ignatius of Loyola says something very similar in his Spiritual Exercises,
quote:
Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.
Once one believes, the question ceases to be 'what is religion for?' and becomes 'what are we for?'

But Evensong's answer is still better than mine.
 
Posted by Candide (# 15755) on :
 
Religion has worldly purposes. There might also be an otherworldly one, depending on what you believe. However, the existence of an otherworldly purpose, does not rob it of the worldly one. The existence or non-existence of God does not nullify the very human needs religion fulfills.

What purpose though? Someone further up the thread referred to Durkheim, who suggested that religion involved raising the profane up to the level of the sacred.

In short, lifting the values of society to a higher level. For instance, a tribal law against thievery, is raised to become a divine law against thievery (usually accompanied with threats of hellfire for the thief).

(This is an explanation that seems to work both with most religions. Problematic though, are religions which inspire followers to distance themselves from society).

Such an explanation on its own would reduce religion to merely being a rod we've ourselves invented, and which we beat ourselves with, while trying very hard to ignore the fact. All alone, this would be a parody of religion. But it still works as a partial explanation, and one which can be applied to a considerable number of actual religions.


As has been mentioned previously, the varied nature of religions does mean that it is exceedingly hard to isolate a common purpose for them all. It is a label which seem to have much in common with what Wittgenstein referred to as a family resemblance, where what made a family resemble each other was not a single essential quality, but a variety of traits shared by some, but not all, members of the group.

Groups connected not true a single essential quality, but through a family resemblance, is usually a nightmare when it comes to trying to explain how they "work". There's always a case that doesn't quite fit.

To me, this signifies that while one cannot come up with the purpose for religion, then it is quite possible to come up with a great number of purposes, which might or might not be applicable in the individual case.
 
Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :
 
I'm surprised no one has brought up the debate on whether or not there might be a "God gene" or various inheritable traits that gave an evolutionary advantage to those capable of having a mystical experience.

There is also a debate over whether "spirituality" might also be an inheritable trait among non-human animals that give them an evolutionary advantage. Examples given have been ritual activity at certain times of day among social primates that strengthens social cohesion and behavior of elephants that seem to indicate awe at beautiful and or terrifying natural phenomena or reverence for the dead long after the time of death. Of course there is the huge risk of anthropomorphism when studying this kind of animal behavior, but if you're asking about the purpose of religion, surely someone is bound to bring up genetics and evolutionary fitness. Much of religion is purely cultural and has no genetic basis, but all?
 
Posted by Horseman Bree (# 5290) on :
 
This thread seems to have moved towards a musing by Ragan Sutterfield, entitled "Why Does God Need The Church?"

Quote: "And though I claim no direct revelation on this matter, I think that with any reading of scripture and listening to the tradition it is clear that God’s mission is not nice services for nice people in nice buildings."

I'm not sure that his conclusion is necessarily the "right one", but it is appropriate.
 
Posted by PaulTH* (# 320) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Desert Daughter:
Depends. Many people (in India, for example) would argue that polytheism ism't really that at all in most cases- it is just that The Godhead is expressed, visioned, and revered, under many different forms and manifestations.
The late 19th century Rabbi of Livorno Italy, Elijah Benamozegh, who was a great intellectual, writer and kabbalist, argued in his greatest work Israel and Humanity, that polytheistic pagans confused the attribues or manifestations of God with separate deities. he even believed that the archangels were,'t beings in their own right, but again, manifestations of the one God. More controversially, from a Christian perspective, he included the Trinity in that, in seeing different aspects of the Godhead, who is basically one.

Benamozegh lived in a climate of comparative religious tolerance in which he could listen to church bells in the early morning, and thank God that we all worship the one Creator in our own way. No fascists to worry about. He died in 1900, before Europe was torn apart by the events of the 20th century. His all inclusive view of world religion has been critcised by Jews and Christians ever since, but few people have ever had such an all inclusive view of human religion.
 
Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Is this religion apart from the Jacobian definition.
 
Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Porridge
I've read a little about belief systems outside of the Monotheistic Big Three as well as a bit about those, and here's what I think "religions" have in common:

1. There's a metaphysical component.

Whether you believe every pebble, plant, and animal you see is imbued with some sort of individual 'spirit,' or whether you believe in a single all-powerful deity, there's an element of the unseen & unknown -- something which operates beyond the reality known to five workaday human senses & human powers.
Actually any view of reality is metaphysical, because no view of reality can be constructed simply from empirical data alone. The metaphysical goes beyond sense experience in the sense that it interprets sense experience within the framework of a paradigm, through which reality is understood to operate in a certain way. The denial of the existence of what is generally referred to as "the supernatural" is a metaphysical view, and that is why "philosophical naturalism" is also known as "metaphysical naturalism". Ontology is a branch of metaphysics, and the claim that all that exists is physical is an ontological, and therefore metaphysical, position. Atheism, with its doctrinaire denial of the supernatural, is therefore metaphysical.

I said above that no view of reality can be constructed from empirical data alone, but I think we can go further than that and say that actually the empirical method is impossible without a metaphysical component. How could any sense experience possibly be conceptualised without an ontology? Without any concept of causation? Without any general rules about how reality works?

Atheists often talk about 'religion', as if it is a kind of 'add-on' to 'normal' reality. I find this wholly unsatisfactory. All world views contain a metaphysical element, and therefore there is an epistemological continuum across all systems of human perception and interpretation. We all rely on general rules which cannot be validated by empirical perception alone. Empiricism itself cannot be validated empirically, and is therefore a metaphysical position. We all make inferences and extrapolations to explain phenomena. There is nothing irrational or 'special' about, for example, inferring intelligent causation as opposed to natural causation without the action of an intelligent agent. These are both simply forms of causation, and both explanations can be metaphysical in so far as they attempt to explain reality as a whole.

Furthermore, some forms of what is termed 'religion' may be as opposed to other forms of 'religion' as naturalism is. And naturalism may be nearer to certain forms of religion than other views which incorporate the supernatural. For example, certain forms of religion are deterministic, and it could be argued that this has more in common with the philosophy of naturalism, than with a monotheistic view which affirms the reality and function of free will.

So the question: "What is religion for?" is pretty meaningless, because there is no homogeneous concept that can be denoted by the term 'religion'. You might as well ask "What is perception for?" "What are world views for?" "What is the interpretation and explanation of data for?"

The question of this thread seems loaded to me. It seems to assume that a naturalistic view of reality is the 'normal', sane, rational view of reality, that no intelligent person could deny, and then, on that basis, we need to explain this strange phenomenon called 'religion'. But who said that the philosophy of naturalism is true?

We could just as easily assume some form of theism as the default position and ask "What is philosophical naturalism for?" and discuss how that unusual philosophy came into being.
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
I missed this thread at the time, as I was away, but I do remember that some anthropologists gave up trying to define religion, as they could not come up with any definition which captured all religions. For example, some religions are non-theistic; then you have phenomena such as shamanism, which are very different from Western religions.

Some of the 19th century thinkers, such as Frazer, are now seen as very Eurocentric, and also as concerned with fixed developments from magic to religion, or from polytheism to monotheism, which now seem rather imposed.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by stonespring:
Some of the purposes of religion discussed came about in different stages of human history. Explaining natural phenomena we did not understand (and trying to control or appease those phenomena) is probably as old as human language in the earliest hunter-gatherer societies. Religion as an instrument of social control came about with the beginnings of social stratification in agricultural city-dwelling societies.

ISTM, separating social from social control is complicated and less straightforward than often supposed. However, it seems to have begun earlier than you propose.
 
Posted by Horseman Bree (# 5290) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Desert Daughter:

But generally, I think Evensong is spot on. God is love, and humans are capable of responding to that love (most of them, anyway).
If God IS Love, and religions express that idea in their teachings, why are so many of the adherents allowed to get away with the most appalling hatred for just about everyone else, often including the other adherents as well?

Why does the Love of God have such small effect? (or, at least, such a small "blast range")

[ 11. May 2014, 19:19: Message edited by: Horseman Bree ]
 
Posted by Garasu (# 17152) on :
 
Ninian Smart identified seven dimensions of religion. I think some later scholars have expanded this.

This approach enables us to analyse different social institutions and see how they may exhibit "religious" characteristics.
 
Posted by jrw (# 18045) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
He is not there to meet our needs.
I think this might need some explanation.
 


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