The ‘ancestor worship is the root of every Religion’. Durkheim argues that the members of a society objectify and project outside their minds the feelings that the social collectivity inspires in them. The individual depends on society for his or her well-being, yet society demands service from the individual and frequently requires that the individual set aside his or her own interests and inclinations. In Ulysses and the Sirens (1984) Jon Elster provides the most penetrating analysis of the logic and the pitfalls of functional explanation. Religion, Hume believes, fills the void when humans lack the aptitude for better founded explanatory principles. Like the concept of religion itself, it is the product of, among other influences, the Age of Exploration and Empire (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), the Protestant Reformation (sixteenth century), and the Augustan Age (eighteenth century). Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the senti­ ment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. Religion, as a social fact, can help explain the individual's religious feelings better than the individual's religious feelings can explain religion. However, the date of retrieval is often important. These features, together with the all-encompassing nature of their theories and the reverence accorded to the founders and the founding texts, leads some critics to liken Marxism and psychoanalysis to religions. first principles. One of the major theories that he outlined in the work was ‘animism’ – the idea that all religions evolved from a rudimentary belief in spirits animating the world. 31–32). This belonged to the nature-myth school which had to be challenged before the ghost and soul theories could be popular.’ In terms of the chronology of ideas on religion, the nature-myth school came before the above-mentioned theories. Individual psychology, however, cannot explain a social fact. These four could be arranged in a unified narrative by any of the three latter groups. The two tendencies produce contrary movements, furthermore, and initiate a continuous "flux and reflux" between polytheism and monotheism. Disclaimer Copyright. For example, Depresses (1760) advanced a theory that religion had its origin in fetishism (belief in magical fetishes or objects): The Portuguese sailors had 30 reported that the coastal Negro tribes of West Africa worshipped inanimate things and animals. "self-evidence." Ultimately, he ventures the humanistic hypothesis that the subconscious explains the experiences he describes, but he countenances religious theory by allowing that a religious reality could work through the subconscious. Compare and contrast between Bhakti and Sufism. impasse and resolution: a critique of the study of religion. He describes a primal crime in which jealous sons kill and devour their father. minneapolis, minn.: fortress press, 1991. spencer, herbert. in the interpretation of cultures. Marx endorses Feuerbach's view of religion as alienation and projection, but argues that religion, or alienated consciousness, is only an epiphenomenal reflection of a more basic dehumanizing alienation at the level of social and economic organization. new york: basic books, 2001. d'aquili, eugene, and newberg, andrew. Religious phenomenon. As a result, he referred to it as the ‘bastard sister of Science’. Critics in turn have raised a number of now-classic challenges. Durkheim argues that religion persists because it satisfies social needs. On this interpretation, Feuerbach's humanistic theory has religious inspiration; it articulates a religious naturalism. This website includes study notes, research papers, essays, articles and other allied information submitted by visitors like YOU. BIBLIOGRAPHY This distinction provides only a provisional orientation because humanistic theories can be given religious significance. Hume rejects the theological anthropology of his forebears' Calvinism wherein God endows humans with an innate religious sense. In his opinion many primitive peoples believed in what he called high Gods. He argues that societies with relatively stable patterns of social organization and relatively poor means of technological control draw on social analogies in constructing their theories because for them the social world represents predictability. stanford, calif.: stanford university press, 1956. james, william. They too see religion in conflict with science. If religion itself is not universal, it is, nevertheless, a response to universal feelings. Content Guidelines 2. In religion is that each stage is built on the other till monotheism. the eighteenth century confronts the gods. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, traced magical and religious threads throughout history and weaved them into a pattern depicting the p… When Magic and associated Rituals failed, primitive people’s thoughts, turned to the possibility of a far greater force in the world of nature. As an adult, Freud considered himself an atheist, but his Jewish background and upbringing and background played an important role in the development of his ideas. Most importantly, perhaps, the Protestant Reformation shattered the relative uniformity of religious thought and culture in Christian Europe. As a matter of fact, the concept of Soul and the concept of spirit are quite different. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, Freud attempted to explain why religion persists in spite of the lack of evidence for its tenets. Hume believed that these two facets of anthropomorphism, that it provides both familiarity (explanation) and the possibility of gaining favor (control), result in opposed tendencies in religion. new york: penguin, 1984. andresen, jensine. According to Swanton (1924:358-68) Tylor has advanced unprovable casual theories. the natural history of religion (1757). Tylor could not see the difference between the two concepts. For example, in some tribal groups of the Chotanagpur region in India, the belief is that thunder and its rumbling noise arc direct cause of rain. Publish your original essays now. totem and taboo: some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics (1913), trans. One should ground explanations of social facts in sociology, or a theory of society. In their opinion, primitive societies offered an evidence of the earliest forms of Religion. He even wrote several books focused on the topic of religion. ." Conceived by Jansenists to defend their theology against papal condemnation, modern probability theory, for example, both rendered religious presuppositions optional, and facilitated modern science (Stout, 1981). Religion, he claims in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), consists in "the sensibility and taste for the infinite" within finite experience (p. 103). According to it, ancient Gods were universally personifications of natural phenomena. Secondly, the role of Religious specialists such as Magicians and priests in dealing with the world of the supernatural. According to... (2) The Ghost Theory: The primitives do not, for good reasons, see the futility of Magic. Society and Religion Assignment Code: ESO-15/AST/TMA/2017-2018 Questions Solved In Assignment: Explain the intellectualist theories of religion. Explain the intellectualist theories of religion. Explain the concept of Protestantism in the light of economic development. As part of his larger project to create a science of human nature, Hume seeks both to isolate the causes of religion in human nature and to identify the consequences of religion in light of human nature. Inverting his definition of religion, Durkheim ultimately claims that the uniting of the community explains the beliefs and practices about sacred things. David Hume's The Natural History of Religion (1757) is the most influential eighteenth-century humanistic theory of religion. Taken literally, religion, like science, represents an attempt to explain, predict, and control the environment. In his poem The Inferno (c. 1308), Dante Alighieri consigns Mohammed to the circle of hell reserved for "sowers of scandal and schism" (p. 326). Compare and contrast between Bhakti and Sufism. The sacred power, he concludes, derives from the clan itself. The attributes or the symbols became personified as deities. Rituals, meant to strengthen society's relationship to the sacred, strengthen society. The dreams are real life-experiences by the primitives. He shows that the primitives were rational though with a limited quantum of knowledge. Early human beings were unable to understand or explain the world of nature. In offering a sociological explanation of the personal beings that define religion, Horton departs from Hume. To explain an institution or behavior's presence by its effects, one must also identify a feedback loop "whereby the effect maintains its cause" (p. 32). Specifically religious concepts (as opposed to folklore, myths, etc.) Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. False assumption because you can have synchronic religion because you can have animism and polytheism developing at the same time at different parts of the world, several different things are happening at the same time. To characterize religion most generally, he introduces a notion that influenced Eliade and his followers, and that eventually succumbed to ethnographic counterexamples. new york: norton, 1950. freud, sigmund. Schleiermacher's religious approach to religion influenced later theory as much as Hume's humanistic one. religion in mind: cognitive perspectives on religious belief, ritual, and experience. Here is your essay on the intellectualist theories of religion ! Answer the following in about 250 words each. This commitment belies the alleged priority of religious feeling to religious belief. He argued that belief in mana had both historical and theoretical priority. Despite this diversity, he claims, all particular religious phenomena coincide in "the belief of invisible, intelligent power" (p. 21). Moments of what Durkheim calls "collective effervescence," when the social group physically gathers and the individual feels uplifted and fortified by the crowd, are especially powerful, Durkheim claims, in creating religious ideas and the sacred. The theoretical study of religion emerged in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Qur'han itself carefully positions Jews and Christians in relation to Islam. Anthropomorphizing the unknown causes not only renders them more familiar and comprehensible, but also furnishes the possibility of gaining their favor "by gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices" to control future events (p. 47). Sometimes they heedlessly suppose that the (putative) benefits maintain the beliefs or practices. Nature-Myth school was a German School, dealing with Indo-European Religions. notre dame, ind. 4. Examine the nexus between religion and politics of the state. The mind has biases toward a few "ontological categories" (e.g., inanimate objects, animate objects, and agents) that activate specialized "inference systems" (e.g., intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive psychology). Sir Edward Tylor’s theory of Animism considers both the origin and “development of Religion”. In premodern Europe, the known religious horizon consisted of (1) the mythology of ancient Greek and Roman pagans, (2) Jews, (3) Muslims, and (4) Christians. Religion came to be viewed as a discreet domain of culture, distinct from morality, and ranged alongside law, science, politics, and art. The second kind of Magic was based on the notion that things that came into contact would remain in contact always. Unlike science, however, which employs impersonal processes and entities as its explanatory idiom, religion employs personal forces and entities. The bloodshed caused by religious violence and the growing explanatory power of science led others to adopt a nonreligious stance to try to explain religion in nonreligious terms, often with the intention of hastening its supposed demise. new york: arno press, 1978. penner, hans. Intellectualist theories link religiousness to a need to understand and control the world. An explanation of religion must, Durkheim argues, recognize that religion is a social fact. Because they need "to form some particular and distinct idea" of the causes and because science "exceeds" their comprehension, "the ignorant multitude" allow the imagination to clothe the unknown causes with human features (p. 29). Sometimes he treats it purely as an illustration of a universal psychological conflict. The attempt to safeguard religion from science by maintaining the primacy of feeling—the approach shared by Schleiermacher, Muller, Eliade, and James—runs aground on the fact that religious feelings are not in truth independent of, and prior to, religious beliefs. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) he insists that the generative source of religion cannot simply be ignorance. This article presents Tylor's main theories in the field of anthropology, especially as presented in his four published books, the most famous of which is Primitive Culture, and in the manuscript sources for his last, unpublished, one on ‘The natural history of religion’. These latter are all universal, he claims, and have a "precise determinate object," whereas religion is not universal and is not uniform in its "ideas." Comte (1908) took up this theory and wrote that in due courses Fetishism was replaced by Polytheism. Encyclopedia.com. The emergent theoretical study of religion had its inception in apologetics and polemics. In The Mystical Mind (1999) they provide models of brain function to explain mystical experience, myth, and ritual. Social facts place constraints on individuals and can contribute to explanations of individual psychology. © 2019 Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. We have no means to know if this or something else is what was actually thought by the primitives. The general term religion reflects this differentiation. new york: peter lang, 1989. preuss, j. samuel. Humanistic theories explain religion in terms of the humans who create or subscribe to them. Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg present another case where the distinction between humanistic and religious theories breaks down. Although the believer understands them literally, religious beliefs and practices are fundamentally not attempts at explanation, prediction, and control. intellectualist theories: it suggests that other aspects of religion can be explained by starting with what participants believe. Essay on the Intellectualist Theories of Religion (1620 Words) (1) The Nature-Myth School: It is further divided into intellectualist theories and emotionalist theories. Though Horton revives both intellectualism and a variation of Hume's definition of religion, he repudiates the sort of distasteful elitism Hume epitomizes and remedies Hume's neglect of the social factors causing religion. The psychology of religion consists of the systematic study and interpretation of religion using the methods and theories of c…, Religion, Sociology of They explicitly aver that their models explain the origin of religion. on religion: speeches to its cultured despisers (1799), trans. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 1993. hume, david. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. political system of highland burma. Religion, Durkheim claims, universally entails an absolute distinction between the sacred, "things set apart and forbidden," and the profane (pp. Feuerbach complicates matters, however, by insisting that theological statements predicating attributes of God must be inverted. In biology, natural selection provides the feedback loop whereby the effect of an adaptation explains its presence in a population. With the passage of time, the symbolic representations came to have an independent identity and became separated from that which they represented. Discuss the social significance of pilgrimages. Robin Horton, for example, in a series of essays spanning thirty years (and collected in 1993) argues for an intellectualist explanation of religion. TOS4. Its conceptual configurations took shape from contemporary general attitudes toward religion and other human cultural phenomena, from current theories against which it reacted, and from ethnographic data that had surfaced in the nineteenth century. He owes much to Tylor but places magic in a phase anterior to belief in supernatural … The social function of religion manifests itself as it “serves as the carrier of social sentiments providing symbols and rituals that enable people to express the deep…show more content… Intellectualist approaches to religion, by contrast, prioritize the capability of the human mind to make deductions from observation and experience, which underpin the attempt to comprehend and explain the world, frequently via belief systems. It includes the study of the relation of…, private religion In conventional sociological terms, religion is a public activity involving communal practices (such as worship and sacraments), and…, Religion, Naturalistic Reconstructions of, Religion in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, Religion in Mexico, Catholic Church and Beyond, Religion in Canada: A Historical Survey, 1500 to the Present, Religion, Western Perceptions of Traditional Religions, Religion, Western Perceptions of World Religions, Religion, Western Presence in Southeast Asia, Religion, Western Presence in the Pacific, Religion: Indigenous Peoples' View, South America, https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/religion-theories. They gain this additional salience from their "aggregate relevance" to important social and moral processes. He called this impersonal force mana. purity and danger. Elster remarks that virtually all social scientists who invoke functional explanations fail to specify a comparable feedback loop. Frazer argues that mankind realized that magic was not real and that they had were not creating results. These mental subsystems produce a set of intuitive default expectations concerning members of the category. Compare and contrast between Bhakti and Sufism. He distinguished between two types of Magic practiced by primitive people. Schleiermacher and James also flout the proper order of explanation. A Cognitive Theory of Religion' by Stewart Guthrie In order to explain a fact as general as [religion] by an illusion, it would be necessary that the illusion invoked ... have causes of an equal gen-erality. In his opinion from a dependence on Magic, one would turn to Religion and then eventually to Scientific thinking. Religious theories explain religion in terms of a religious object, entity, force, or ultimate reality. the elementary forms of religious life (1912), trans. Guthrie claims that over the course of human evolution, the importance of other humans to human existence selected for traits that facilitate the detection of human agency in ambiguous or uncertain circumstances. Although Durkheim relies on irremediably faulty ethnography and untenable assumptions about the simplicity of "primitive" societies, his interpretation of Australian religion well illustrates his general theory. Hume's theory explains religion in intellectual terms: as an account of the unknown causes at work in the natural and social worlds. In Hume's naturalistic anthropology, religious principles are derivative. manuel, frank. ." To this extent, Feuerbach's theory is humanistic. Social scientists generally v…, Psychology of Religion 5. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1966. douglas, mary. Religiosity is a term used by social scientists to refer to religious behavior. faces in the clouds: a new theory of religion. new york: harper, 1957. fraser, james. the naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion. Ludwig Feuerbach, for instance, argued in The Essence of Christianity (1841) that humans unconsciously project the essential characteristics of the human species outside themselves and reify them in the form of a divine being. In his pithy phrase, "Ignorance is the mother of devotion" (p. 75). Therefore they believed that a greater stronger being was in control and caused these effects. They possess superior powers and control destiny of human beings. One cannot explain social facts in this way, he claims, because societies, though composed of individuals, exhibit laws and properties of their own. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. Tylor’s theory that experiences of death, disease and dreams make primitives believe in the existence of an immaterial entity, cannot be proved. According to Tylor, experiences of death, disease, visions and dreams lead the primitives to think about the existence of immaterial power, i.e., the Soul. . As early as 1799, however, an alte… Secondly, the logical process given by Tylor by which the idea of Soul leads primitives to the idea of spirits is not understandable. He argues that simply demonstrating that unintended, beneficial effects result from the presence of an institution or behavior in a society does not suffice to explain the presence of the institution or the behavior. Sleep is temporary loss of sensibilities. Explain the intellectualist theories of religion. : harvard university press, 1959. marx, karl, and engels, frederick. It claims to confirm, continue, correct, and complete earlier revelation. minneapolis, minn.: fortress press, 1999. douglas, mary. Unlike Max Muller, Herbert Spencer and Edward Tylor focused their attention on Religious behaviour of the primitives. Durkheim's functional explanation of religion arguably does include a feedback loop: The effects of religious rites (strengthened social bonds) maintain their cause (religion) precisely because social bonds produce religion. A religion is a shared system of beliefs and practices concerning sacred things that unites a community. It almost seems, on Hume 's view, directly competes with science however... Nevertheless, a response to repression, for good reasons, see the of... 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