Introduction to the Extremities & Diversity of Religious Belief
Religious beliefs are subjective, sacred and personal. Many ideas may be surprising to you. Please be respectful and open-minded of religious ideas throughout this course.
Religion helps us answer questions such as: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? Where did my universe come from? How do I deal with sickness and death? How do I overcome adversity? Is death final? Where are my dead loved ones? ...
Many religions exist to answer these questions. The worlds' population can be divided into the following adherents.
See
For your information, as we go through the course the following religious population statistics may be helpful http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html:
1. Christianity: 2.1 billion
2. Islam: 1.3 billion
3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
4. Hinduism: 900 million
5. Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
6. Buddhism: 376 million
7. Primal-indigenous: 300 million
8. African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
9. Sikhism: 23 million
10. Juche (North Korea): 19 million
11. Spiritism (Such as Voodoo and Santeria): 15 million
12. Judaism: 14 million
13. Baha'i: 7 million
14. Jainism: 4.2 million
15. Shinto: 4 million
16. Cao Dai: 3 million
17. Zoroastrianism (Chiefly in Bombay today): 2.6 million
18. Tenrikyo: 2.4 million
19. Neo-Paganism: 1 million
20. Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
21. Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
22. Scientology: 500 thousand
Our course will show us both how unique various belief systems and practices are and how unusually similar we find religion and symbols in different cultures and time periods.
Map of world religions:
Examples of Religious Culture
SYNCRETISM: Catholic Virgin Mary, Mexican Virgin of Guadelupe and Aztec Tonantzin
SHARED SYMBOLS: compared with Mary and Jesus
SHARED BELIEFS: Sacrifice among many religions
SACRED SPACE: persistent use of the same area as a sacred site for succeeding religions and cultures
The earliest Norwegian stave churches prior to the 12th century design and ornamentation might represent previous Norse religious hofs:
SYNCRETISM: Sun Worship on solstice
ASCETISIM: Philippine Christian flagellation and Muslim Shiite practices
Opus Dei of Dan Brown's fictional work The Davinci Code practices self-mortification
COMMUNISM REJECTED: Zoroastrians vs. Mazdak. Chosroes I known as Anushirvan, meaning "immortal soul" respected because he did away with Mazdak's believers and upheld Zoroastrianism
PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIAN POLYTHEISM: Muhammad and Satanic verses
REJECTION OF MODERN MORES: Girolamo Savonarola was a conservative medieval priest at the time of the Medici's who asked people to give up their vanities and had people gathering items and destroying them in what came to be known as the Bonfire of the Vanities. A religous man and wonderful artist, Sandro Botticelli, famous for his "pagan" painting, The Birth of Venus, destroyed some of his paintings on "pagan" topics in the Bonfire of the Vanities, now painting chiefly religious scenes. See the Wikipedia. This "morality police" I compared with the Islamic Republic-era morality police who search the streets for people disobeying the current, non-Western, standards of morality and dress.
ADAPTATION: Veil in ancient Middle East
ADAPTATION: Temporary marriage
SHARED RITUAL: Excarnation
REFORMATION: Martin Luther and Catholic Indulgences
DIFFERENT MORES: Brother-Sister marriage
Zoroastrian khwedodah
SHARED SYMBOL: The Evil Eye and God's Protective Eye
The protective eye in the hand is seen in Native American, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures, among others
Eye of Horus (eye of god) or Wadjet with wings also symbolizing the sun |
Hamsa, God's Protective Hand with eye of God to ward off the evil eye, with Hebrew Chai (life) inscribed where the eye would be |
Arab khamsa (meaning 5, god's protective hand), or Hand of Fatima with the eye of God to ward off the evil eye |
Egyptian winged eye of Horus
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Aztec eye of god carving,
possibly derived from viewing solar eclipse
Hittite winged sun
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god's eye and pyramid on the seal of the U.S.
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Reading
Read chapters 1 and 2 of Scupin, Raymond, editor. Religion and Culture: An Anthropological Focus. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Terms to Know
Acculturation = borrowing traits from another culture
Syncretism = combining beliefs from different religions
Asceticism = denial of one's body in order to attain greater spirituality
Cosmology = the nature of the universe
Cosmogony = the origin of the universe
Mores = moral attitudes which govern social interaction
Theodicy = defense of God's goodness in light of the existence of evil
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