World Religions Lecture Notes PDF

Hi. Welcome back to World Religions. We are now in week two. The reading for this week is the first chapter of the Stephen Prothero book, Why Religion Matters. The title of the chapter is Why Religion Matters. It's pages one through twenty five. And what I want to do today in this lecture is to just...

Hi. Welcome back to World Religions. We are now in week two. The reading for this week is the first chapter of the Stephen Prothero book, Why Religion Matters. The title of the chapter is Why Religion Matters. It's pages one through twenty five. And what I want to do today in this lecture is to just go over some, groundwork on what it is that we're going to be doing in this class. What does it mean to study religion? What is this thing we're studying? What is religion? What counts as religion? And how should we go about studying religious traditions and religious people? So these are all questions we're going to interrogate today. In the book, Prothero notes that there are two ways of talking about religion. I would likely argue that there are more than two ways, but there are two ways that we can concern ourselves with today. The first is the insider way of speaking about religion. These are the ways of faith and devotion. So this is how Christians speak about Christianity or Jews speak about Judaism. It's how a Buddhist teacher might, speak of the Buddha in his or her Dharma talks, or it's how Hindu sing of their love of Krishna. This is sometimes called theology if it's trying to work out religious questions, Or if it's simply worship, we might call it devotionalism. This is fascinating, which is just not what we're going to be doing in this class. What we're concerned with is the non devotional and non theological way, the academic way of speaking about religion. So in our class, our aim is not to do religion. Right? We're not going to be learning about Christianity so we can be Christians or learning about Hinduism so that we can become Hindus. And it's also not to prove or disprove religion. You may have seen some of these famous debates usually between, atheist philosopher and, Christian pastor of some kind. And they go back and forth on whether or not it's rational or reasonable to believe in God, and if you can prove the existence of God or disprove the existence of God, and so on. This is also not religious studies. That might be considered philosophy of religion, but it's certainly not what we're going to do in this class. What we're gonna do in this class is to understand religion. So we're not here to prove it or disprove it or even to judge it based on its truth claims, we're going to understand it. So we're looking to understand religion in all of its fullness, which means that we have to engage with it on its own terms. So just to make this clear, theology asks critical questions from the standpoint of a religious tradition, and it assumes that the religious tradition is authoritative or true. So a theological question might be, something like, what should the role of women be in a Christian community? So here, what, theologians might do is go back through the Christian scriptures and see what Paul or the gospel writers had to say about women. Should women be allowed to be priests? Should they be allowed to be bishops? Should they be allowed to speak at all in church? These are the questions that various Christian communities come up with various answers for, but they are insider questions. Or similarly, does Jesus's death redeem all sinners or just a select few? So as you can see here, in order to participate in this conversation, you have to have a sense of, Jesus as being more than just a regular person. You have to believe that his death had a higher significance than just the ordinary death of an ordinary person. You also have to believe in something called sin or have at least a concept of what that is and to believe in some kind of redemption from that sin. If you don't buy into any of those concepts you're not going to participate in this conversation. So it's not a conversation that an outsider could have It's a conversation that an insider would have. Similarly, how can we escape samsara? This is an incredibly important question for Hindus and for Buddhists because they have this concept of samsara, which is the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, death and redef, to which we are all born and reincarnated and so on. If you do not believe in reincarnation, if that's not your religious tradition, and you do not think that souls are reborn and, and redye again and again and again, this question isn't relevant for you. Or sometimes theologians will try to take, a scripture and use it to solve a contemporary problem. So for example, how can we apply the teachings of the Quran to the problem of climate change? Right? Given that the Quran was written hundreds of years ago when climate change wasn't exactly an issue, The prom the prophet Mohammed had very little to say directly about climate change. Right? But Muslim scholars might go back and look at the things that the prophet Mohammed did say say about other topics and then try to infer what he would have taught about climate change. Similarly, Christian theologians might do this with the teachings of Jesus. So for example, whether or not, how we should behave, for example, on social media. What is the Christian way to behave on social media? Well, obviously, Jesus had absolutely nothing to say about Instagram or TikTok or or Facebook. Right? But they might be able to go back and to study some things that he did say about, say, being kind to one another and then extrapolate from there the way people should behave in the twenty first century on social media. So again, these are all theological questions. They require insider knowledge and they assume that the religious tradition is authoritative or true. Now religious studies does something very different. Religious studies asks critical questions on how to best understand religious phenomena, religious texts, practices, institutions, and communities. So for example, a religious studies question might ask something like, how does ritual or myth or sacred texts function differently in different religions? How, say, does the creation, story in the Bible function for Christian communities or for Jewish communities or and so on? Or just a general question, what is a religion? What counts as a religion? Can religion be differentiated from other forms of culture? For example, is football a religion? I certainly know some people who, treat it like it is. And if you're going to argue that it is or if you're going to argue that it isn't, then you have to establish what the criteria of a religion are in order to argue that football, meets those criteria or it doesn't. Or similarly, is nationalism a religion? Right? Nationalism seems to have, myths and rituals and community identity and sacred histories and all of these things that oftentimes the things we call religions have. And so how do we know if, American nationalism is a religion or not? And is that a question that can be answered? Many scholars have debated on whether or not that kind of question could even really be addressed. Or we might ask historical questions in religious studies. For example, how has British colonialism impacted how Hinduism is practiced in India? So for example, if you are suddenly occupied by a colonial power, one would assume that that would change the way you practice your religion. Hinduism in India was practiced somewhat differently before the British arrived and practiced differently during British occupation and then practice differently after the British occupation because religions do change over time based on their context and circumstances. So what religious studies seeks to do is to study how those changes over time occur and what their consequences are for the communities involved. Or we might ask a kind of process question, like, how did Christianity grow from a small apocalyptic movement in Palestine to a global religion? Right? How do you get from, Jesus and his twelve disciples walking around, Judea telling people to, you know, be nice to each other and turn the other cheek to Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics and holy wars and crusades and so on and so on. Right? That process is a historical, political, social question that we might be able to answer, through those, methods. So one thing I like to do at the beginning of this class is to tell a little story that illustrates something, very fundamental about religious studies. So let's take a minute to talk about bears. This is a story about a community of Native Americans called the Wendat people, and the Wendat people lived in the, upper Great Lakes region, now on the border of the United States and Canada. So here you have a picture on the left of some contemporary Wendat people, at one of their gatherings. And the Wendat, especially before the colonial encounter when they were living on their ancestral lands, there were a lot of bears in that area. The various types of bears. Right? And the Wendat had a very sacred relationship with those bears. They considered themselves, the bears, to be transmigratory creatures, meaning that the bears were beings that crossed between the worlds, that crossed between the spirit world and the, and the material world. And so the Wendat revered the bears. They, imagined the bears as a kind of totem for their community. Now when the Jesuit missionaries, Catholic Jesuit missionaries showed up in the Great Lakes region and started talking to the Wendat about Jesus and the church and sin and etcetera, etcetera, the Wendat had no idea what they were talking about. The Wendat didn't have a concept of sin. They didn't have a concept of, of of sacred text even. And they could not figure out what these Jesuits wanted or if they could be trusted. And so one Wendat village sent a message to a sister village down the river and said, you have encountered these Jesuits before. Right? So, could you maybe send someone who knows something about those Jesuits to come and talk to us and tell us what the heck these people want? And why is it that they seem to want to convert us to some other way of being, and whether or not they're friend or foe or should be trusted? And so the sister village did send someone. They sent, the person in their tribe, in their community, who'd had the most encounters with the Catholics. And that person got to this village and gathered the community together and said, I know you're very curious about these Catholics, and you need to understand something very important about them. I know about these Catholics. And what I can tell you is that the Catholics are the people who do not care about bears. Now, I usually ask students whether or not that is an accurate description of Catholicism. And most students will say, no, of course not. That's not an accurate description of Catholicism, especially students who happen to be Catholic. They'll they might say, no. That's ridiculous. That's not an accurate description of my religion. But then I would challenge, is it not? Because I've read the Catholic catechism. I've studied the Catholic catechism, nothing in church tradition, nothing in any of the sacred scriptures of the church about bears. They really couldn't care less about bears. Right? So it is an accurate description of Catholicism. It is true. The Catholic religion doesn't really care much about bears. Is it a useful description, though? That's the question. And of course, the answer is no. If you want to actually know anything about Catholicism, if you want to know about what it means to be a Catholic, if you want to know about, Catholic history or Catholic doctrine or the way that the church is organized or any of that, whether or not they care about bears is not going to help you. Right? And that's because it's a Wendat description of Catholicism. It's taking something important to the Wendat, bears, and then holding Catholicism up to it and saying, do they care about bears? No. They don't. So when we do this with religions, and people do this all the time, we compare a religion or we try to describe a religion in terms of, say, our religion or religions that we're more familiar with. And what we usually end up with is something that might be true, but doesn't actually tell us anything of any importance about the religion we're talking about. So you hear this often sometimes. I'll hear students say things like, oh, I know what Judaism is. Jews are the people who don't believe Jesus was the Messiah. Okay. True. Right? But Jews also don't believe lots of other things. They don't believe in the Easter bunny. They don't believe in Santa Claus. Right? And whether or not they believe in Jesus is just about as important about whether or not they believe in the Easter bunny or Santa Claus. Right? No one at Temple Beth Shalom is down there talking about Jesus. Right? So if you want to understand Judaism, you need to understand what matters to Jews just in the same way that if you want to understand Catholicism, you want to learn what matters to Catholics. Or if you want to understand Wendat religion, you learn what's important to Wendat, and then you describe those religious traditions in the terms of that tradition. So that's what we're going to try to do in this class. When we encounter, say, Hinduism, we're not going to describe Hinduism in terms of, whether or not they believe in Jesus or whether or not, they, do x y z, other religious practice from another religion. We're going to try to get into the minds of Hindu practitioners to learn what they do, how they describe themselves, and how, those descriptions influence how they understand themselves and their relationship to whatever sacred powers that they, are in relationship with. Okay. So now that we've established that we're going to try to study religions on their own terms, then we have to ask one question. What is studying religion all about? Well, for as long as people have been studying religion, they have struggled to define it and to determine, the criteria for what counts as a religion and what doesn't. You'll remember my example about football. Is football a religion? And if it is a religion, then what criteria does it meet in order to count as a religion? Or if it isn't a religion, then why isn't it a religion? What criteria does it not meet in order to count as a religion? We call these definitions and these criterias theories. So the study of religion is basically broken down into theories and methods. So theories are our attempt to describe what religions are and how they function. Methods are how scholars then apply those definitions to the people and things they study, and both theory and method shape the scholars end product. Many of these definitions or theories have knowingly and unknowingly reflected the biases of those articulating them. So if you remember the story about the bears, the description of Catholicism as the religion that doesn't care about bears, right, that reflects the biases of the Wendat people who are doing the describing. Right? Or similarly, if you were to describe Judaism as the religion that doesn't believe in Jesus, that would reflect a bias toward Christianity that you would assume the person making that description, does believe Jesus to be something, to be important in some way. Now the study of religion really as an academic discipline began in Western Europe, mostly among Protestant men. And so oftentimes the things that are influencing our definitions of religion come from those biases. So for example, individual belief, say, in God or Jesus is central to Protestantism. In order to be considered a Protestant Christian, you have to believe certain things. You have to hold something in your mind and in your heart to be true. So Protestant scholars often defined religion as a belief system, and you'll hear this all the time even from people who are not themselves Protestants. If you stop someone on the street and say, what's a religion? Many people will say, oh, it's a belief system. And that is a good description of Protestantism. However, it's not a good description of most other religions. Many other religions, they don't care so much about what's inside your head or your heart. They don't care about the ideas that you're holding. They care more about what you do. Right? So, for Protestantism, it matters a great deal what you believe. But for Hinduism, it matters much more what you do. Or sometimes religions value who you are. So for example, your membership in a tribe or in an ethnicity, right, defines your membership in that religion. So there's an old joke that says, what do you call the atheist who shows up at Yom Kippur services? Yom Kippur is the most holy day in the Jewish calendar. So what do you call an atheist who shows up at Yom Kippur services? A Jew. And the the joke here is that Judaism is as much an ethnicity as it is a, as it is a set of doctrines, as it is a history. It's a people. So what matters, is not necessarily belief, but your membership in this community. So when we define religion as, say, a belief system, we're really coming from a very Protestant perspective, and therefore, it's not terribly useful for the study of lots of other religions. Similarly, sacred text, was very central is very central to Protestantism. Protestants believe, and as do many other Christians, that the Bible is the word of God, that it is, that that there is a God who writes books essentially through humans, but that, the text itself is the utterances of the almighty. And so these protestant scholars would then look around at other religions and they would see some of them don't have texts, right? You know, Islam does and Judaism does and Hinduism does, but African religions for the most part didn't have texts and Native American religions didn't have text. And so these Protestant scholars would often then say, oh well those aren't real religions. They don't really count or they're inferior religions. But the only reason why they said that was because sacred text matters a great deal in their religion. Right? And so they were using their religion's criteria to define and evaluate other people's religions. So scholars have come up with hundreds of definitions or theories of religion, and some of them have been political, and some of them have been philosophical or theological or social or even psychological. What's important is that none of these theories fully defined religion. Right? It wasn't as if one day some guy showed up and had definition of religion and we all went, oh, thank goodness. He finally got it right. No. They're all incomplete, and they're all reflective of the perspectives, and biases of the people who are making them. So let's take a look at some examples. Here you have one from Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was a Protestant minister and Protestant theologian, and so he wrote that religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. Well, that would make sense if you believed in one sovereign God who was in charge of the whole world. Right? Then you would equate your religion with being dependent on that God. But not all religions have that. Right? Not all religions have one, God. Some have many. Some have none. And they don't all have this sense of dependence. So you can see, Schleiermacher's own religious, perspectives reflected in his definition of all religion here. Or similarly, E. B. Tyler, one of the first theolog or sorry, one of the first scholars of religion, said that religion is the belief in spiritual beings. Again, you'll notice belief, right? So here he's coming from that Protestant perspective that what matters about a religion is what's in people's heads, whether or not they believe in these spiritual beings. And again, that works for Protestantism, it doesn't work for many, many other religions. Then you have a very different, definition. This is from Karl Marx. Some of you may have heard of this one before. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people. So this is the famous line that religion is the opium of the masses or the people. What Marx is saying here is that religion is like opium, meaning that it's like a drug that numbs you out. And so what religion is for Marx is a tool that the people in power use to keep the people they oppress, oppressed. So for Marx, religion is like a drug that you give someone to keep them, keep them down, to keep them oppressed, to keep them, under your subjugation. So again, not a terribly, pleasant definition of religion, but it's certainly coming from Marxist perspective because Marx really saw the world in terms of that kind of class struggle. The world for Marx was really delineated between the haves, the bourgeoisie, and the have nots, the proletariat. And he argued that the the haves would always try to oppress the have nots, and they would use a variety of tools in order to do it. And religion, for Marx, was one of those tools. Now you have an American philosopher and theologian of religion, William James, Religion shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, for so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine. So I had a professor who used to call this definition of religion the I see God in the sunset definition, And what he meant by that was that James is defining religion here as something deeply individual. Again, very Protestant. Right? Deeply individual and something that you can have all alone in your solitude. Right? So religion for James is the thing that you walk up into the mountains and you look over the great vista and you feel the presence of God. It's very American. It's very, and it's very Protestant. You can't be, you can be a a Protestant alone. Right? Protestantism is is very adaptive that way. You can take your Bible and you can go and be a Protestant on the moon. There is nothing stopping you from doing that. You cannot be a Catholic alone. You can try, but you won't be able to fully practice your religion. Right? Because you, as a regular Catholic person, cannot turn the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. You cannot receive the sacraments. You cannot participate in, in the community in that way. You need the priests and the bishops and the Vatican and the pope in order to fully practice your Catholicism. So you can see here how this is a very, Protestant, very individualized definition of religion. Then we have the opposite. This is, Durkheim. Durkheim argued that a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices. Oh, he put practices in. That's good. Right? Relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden. Beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a church. All those who adhere to them. Okay? So here, Durkheim is saying is religion is the thing that holds a community together, and the community becomes the religion, and the religion becomes the community. So for Durkheim, it's not men in their solitude. It's everyone together producing this religion, and then the religion serves to reinforce the produced group identity of the community. Now here we have another famous one. This is Sigmund Freud. Religion is the universal neuroses of humanity, which basically means that, Sigmund Freud is saying that religion is mental illness. Right? It's a psychological problem. Right? Here we have psychological problems according to Freud, and religion is the thing we try to use to solve those psychological problems. So that's not a definition that a lot of religious practitioners would get on board with. Right? And then here you have a feminist theologian. This is a Catholic feminist theologian, Mary Daly, writing that if God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live in the human churches or communities imagine God in male, churches or communities imagine God in male terms, then that religion will always harm women because it will always set the male above the female. And so it will always be part of patriarchy and female oppression. So here you can see how many different ways there are to approach the definition of religion, and they're not all complete. Right? They're not, none of these are whole and perfect. You may even severely disagree with some of them. But they're all attempts at describing religion from the perspective of the scholar. What's important to see here is that every definition has a point of view and that there is no view from nowhere, meaning that no matter how hard I try, I can try to create the most expansive, the least offensive, the least biased, the most inclusive definition of religion as I can. And no matter how hard I try, it will always be my definition. It will always reflect the things that are important to me. Another way to think about defining religion is to think of it like making a map. So this is from a scholar named J. Z. Smith, who writes that, each definition of religion is like a map made by a particular cartographer. So when I'm not teaching this class online, what I usually do is have students draw a map of the college campus. And I noticed that all their maps are a little bit different. Students who take a lot of math classes might put the math building on their map. Whereas students who have never taken a math class, the math the math building doesn't even appear on the map. Or sometimes, someone will put the building that they go to the most right at the center of the map, or maybe they put on the map the place they love to have lunch or the place where they hang out the most with their friends. And those are not things that are gonna necessarily be on my map. Right? And the important thing here to realize is that a map is always just a map. It's a representation of the campus. It's not the campus itself. I can hold up a map and it can be even even if it's a perfectly accurate map, even if it has all the buildings on it in exactly the right proportions, it's still not the campus. It's a map of the campus because maps are not territory. And this is true for religious studies as well. No matter what we do when we describe Hinduism, what we're describing isn't Hinduism. It's our descriptions of the various behaviors and texts and thoughts and ideas and histories that we've collected and put into a box and labeled it Hinduism. Right? So one of the things that we have to confront here, is that there is a really troubling origin to the study of world religions and to religious studies in general. Religious studies as a discipline and world religions as a subject really began with, white, mostly Protestant men trying to explain why other people were religious in the ways that they were. And those men, for the most part, took for granted that their religious traditions were superior. So these early theories were inherently, engulfed in white supremacy, in Protestant supremacy, and they brought that baggage with them into the field. So these European scholars, they would use Western Christian metrics to measure the value of other religions. Right? Like, they would say, oh, do you have a text? Oh, if you have a text, then you're a little bit better than the religions that don't have a text. Right? So they might create a kind of hierarchy of religions based on this, and that was obviously very problematic. It also often used words like primitive and savage to describe non European people, and their definitions of primitive and savage were everything that they considered themselves not to be. Right? And that's obviously problematic way of approaching the world. So the other thing to realize is that these theories were often evolutionary. Religious studies as a field really gets started in the nineteenth century, not before. Before that, we really simply have theology. So the nineteenth century is when we begin to study religion as an academic discipline, and evolutionism was a definite part of the intellectual discourse of the time. So these communities would often assume that superior religions like Protestant Christianity, in their minds, evolved out of lesser religions like Catholicism. And this is in the same way that humans evolved out of primates. Well, to think of religions that way is to think of some religions as fully human and these other religions as, less than human. Right? And animism and indigenous religions, religions of, native to the people of Africa or the Americas, were often considered the most primitive, than, than, say, Western European Christianity. And this is not just racist, although it's very racist. It's also wrong. It's inaccurate, because new religions do come out of other religions. Like, Christianity did emerge out of a Jewish context, and Buddhism did emerge out of a Hindu context. But that doesn't make those religions better. It just means that the people who, created those religions were dealing with new problems. Right? First century Judea, the Jewish community in first century Judea was living under a specific set of circumstances, namely Roman occupation and Roman oppression. And so many Jews, found the teachings of Jesus and his, his sort of, Messianic teachings to be very compelling, and so that gave rise to Christianity. So they're not better or worse. They're just different. They're born out of new sets of problems and, and new sets of contexts. So these racist and Protestant centric views shaped the academic study of religion, and it's unfortunate because they had a way of not just staying in the academic study of religion, they seeped into the way that even regular people sometimes think and talk about religion, even if they don't mean to be, being racist or being Protestant centric. It somehow sort of just got into the culture. Now religious studies today is making the effort to confront and correct these problems. But the first thing we need to do is we need to see them. We need to notice when we are creating those hierarchies of religion, And we need to, take ownership of that and to reinvent what religious studies is doing so that it can avoid causing further harm. Welcome back. I'm Professor Rees. This is the second part of our why religion matters lecture. So the first thing I want to do today is to go over some very basic assumptions that people make about religions. And I wanna interrogate these assumptions because oftentimes people use these assumptions to define religion or to set out criteria for what counts as a religion and what doesn't. And I wanna sort of poke some holes in some of these assumptions because although many of them might be true for some religions, they're certainly not all true for all religions. So the first one is that religions have gods. Many religions, of course, do have gods or a god, many gods, but some religions like Buddhism, for example, do not. So we can't use the presence of God or gods as one of the criteria for religion. Otherwise, we would be leaving out, one of the world's major traditions. Another assumption is that religions are belief systems. We talked about this a little bit last time. The problem with this assumption is that it centers belief as the most important part of a religion. And as we talked about last time, that's really only true for some religions, and it's even truer for some more than others. Now you might be asking, don't all religions have beliefs? And they do. But they also have lots of other things like practices and rituals and histories and communities and so on. And different religions think of those things as more and less important. So for Protestantism, for example, belief is very, very important. And for Christianity in general, belief is very important. But for other religious traditions, let's take Hinduism, for example, practice is much more important. Ritual practice and getting rituals right and making sure you do the rituals in the correct way is far more important than belief. So describing all religions as belief systems is not really accurate or useful for all religions. The other assumption, this is something that Americans are especially prone to assume, that religion is a discrete and separable part of culture. And we are prone to assume that in the United States because in the United States, that's what we've kinda tried to do. We've tried to think about religion as this thing that happens over here on Sunday mornings, and we do not want it to mix with, say, our government or with other parts of culture, with the law and so on and so forth. And some of those ideas are the intentions are very good. Not having the religion mix with the state, for example, might be of great benefit to the society as a whole. But when we assume that religion can be put into a box that only happens in this time in this place, we're ignoring the fact that religions live inside human beings and human beings don't stay in little boxes. So even in the United States where our Constitution says that we have a separation of, of church and state, although it's not exactly what the constitution says. But even in that, in that doctrine, the government is still made up of people, and people don't leave their religions at the door. People take their religions with them wherever they go. And so inevitably religion will find its way into the government, into society. And we can see this in myriad ways. The simplest is just something like the calendar. For example, Congress does not meet on Christmas Day. The post office is not open on Christmas Day. Banks in the United States are not open on Christmas Day. They are, however, all open on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Right? These are the holiest days in, in Jewish, tradition, but the post office continues to run. You probably still have to show up to your glasses, and, and and certainly, Congress is meeting on, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So we can see here just even in something so simple as that, you can see that some religions are absolutely intertwined. Christianity in particular is intertwined with, how America has organized itself. Another assumption: that religions make people moral or that one needs to have a religion in order to be moral. And this is a really interesting one because this is something that a lot of Americans, do assume. When, they do when they do polls, Pew the Pew Research Center does, polls like this all the time where they ask many Americans if they would vote for a president who was, a known atheist. And many people just say no. They wouldn't. And the reasons they give are often because, well, if he's an atheist, then how do I know that he or she, is a moral person or an ethical person? And this is a faulty assumption for a variety of reasons. Right? Because the first reason is we can't always all agree on what is moral and what isn't. Some of us may find it morally acceptable to, have sex before marriage, and other people might find that to be not morally acceptable, for example. That's the first problem. The second problem is that we all know that religious people often do very terrible and violent things as do nonreligious people. So it doesn't seem to make much of a difference if someone is, religious or not. It seems like there are much other many other factors that are playing into whether or not someone acts ethically or morally and how we even define those terms. The next one is that religions are their texts, or that even religions have texts. Firstly, not all religions do have texts. Right? Not all of them have books. Indigenous American religions, indigenous African religions do not have, do not have books. But more importantly, people often assume that religions are their texts. And the example for this I always give is that after nine eleven happened, a lot of people ran out and bought copies of the Quran and started these are non Muslim people. A lot of non Muslim Americans ran out and bought copies of the the Quran and read it and said, oh, now I understand what Islam is. Right? Or they were trying to read the Quran so that they could make sense of what had happened, on nine eleven. And this is a problem. Right? Because, religions are not just their books. They are all of the other things that make them up, their histories, their myths, their stories, their rituals, their political realities, and all of the changes that they've encountered over time. So oftentimes, people will say things like, oh, well, Islam is violent, and they'll point to a passage in the Quran that sounds very violent. The problem is is that there's a lot of violence in the Hebrew Bible. There's a heck of a lot of violence, and, there's even some degree of violence in the New Testament. So what were we talking about when we say that Islam is violent? Right? Religions are not their texts. The next one is that religions have essences. Right? Meaning that there are true versions of, of religions and false versions of them. Oftentimes, people say this with very good intentions. They say things like, well, the terrorists who blew up, who who rode the planes into the World Trade Center buildings, that wasn't real Islam. Real Islam isn't violent. And that's just simply not the case because there is no real Islam. Some Muslims have been violent, and many have not. You know, is Christianity violent? Well, no. Christianity itself isn't violent or nonviolent. People are violent or nonviolent in the name of that Christianity as they are interpreting it. So this idea that religions have essences, that there is something at the core of Christianity that we could all agree on, this is a very problematic assumption. The other one that comes up a lot, especially in Western traditions, is that religions are exclusivist. Many Western religions are exclusivist, meaning that if you are a Christian, you cannot also be a Muslim. And if you are a Muslim, you cannot also be a, a Jew. Right? But not all religions are like that. Some religions blend other religions together. For example, Hinduism incorporates all different types of Buddhism into it. Someone can be Navajo, for example, and also be Catholic. They are not now the the Catholic church may not like it if they participate in Navajo religious rituals, but not all religions, are exclusivist. Not all religions say we must be the one and only way you practice. Some religions are open to having lots of other traditions incorporated into them. What you can see here is that many of these assumptions are only true for certain kinds of Western Christianities, and that's because so much of what has influenced contemporary American culture has been influenced by contemporary, oh sorry, by Western Christianities. And so we have all these assumptions sort of flying around in our head, even if we are not ourselves Christians, because they're sort of in the cultural discourse. They're in the, in the warp and woof of what it is to be an American. Here's another one you hear often. All religions are the same at their core. They may look different, but they're all just different paths up the same mountain. I'm sure you've heard something similar to this. And my question is always, why do people say this? Right? Why do people say this? And the answer is this is a product of living in a religiously plural society. So in the United States, for the most part, the Jewish family can live next to the, Buddhist family, can live next to the Catholic family, can live next to the Mormon family, and no one's gonna kill each other. Right? In most circumstances, no one's gonna kill each other. We've all managed in the United States, for the most part, to live in relative religious harmony. We don't have a lot of Catholic pro on Protestant violence, for example, in the US. And they do have that in other parts of the world. And part of why we don't is because it seems as if this statement here that all religions are basically the same, we all really want the same thing, we're all just different paths up the same mountain, that's something that a lot of Americans seem to accept. And of course, the intentions of this are great. That statement makes for good neighbors. That statement means that those families can live next to each other in relative peace. So why do people say it? Because it's nice. Because it creates a harmonious multicultural society. The problem is it's not true. And moreover, it's not useful for the study of religion because all religions are not paths of the same mountain. Some of us aren't even on the same mountain. Some of us aren't even on the mountain at all. Right? So to imagine religions as all meeting in some magical universal place of peace and harmony, may make us feel better, and may certainly be something that we want to hold on to in our daily lives and interactions with lots of other different kinds of people. But if we want to actually understand what makes Hindu practice distinct and interesting, we can't be imagining it as just another path up one mountain and Christianity is another. Right? This kind of glazing over of religious difference is a problem if we want to actually understand religions themselves and the people who practice them. So one of the things that is noted in, the Prothra reading is that there's a widely taught book, by Houston Smith oops, excuse me by Houston Smith called The World's Religions. And when I say it's widely taught, I mean that this class, World Religions, around the country, it often uses this textbook. And that author said that he would only describe religions, quote, at their best and not discuss things like violence or sexism sexism that are part of very various religious traditions. So my question is why do you think that Houston Smith made that decision, and what are the consequences of that decision? I'm sure part of why he made that decision was because he wanted his book to be a tool for that multicultural peacemaking, and that is a worthy ambition. However, when we ignore the whole parts of religions that are not necessarily their best, we are leaving a lot of information on the table. Right? Anybody who's ever been in a long term relationship with another human being knows that if you only ever saw your partner at their best, right, you'd probably be missing a whole lot of what makes that person that person and what they care about. Now some of you may only wanna see their partner at their best. Right? But you'll never fully know someone unless you see them warts and all. Right? Unless you see them for their flaws, see them for their hypocrisy, see them for their contradictions, and their, and their and their gifts, and their beauty, and their skills. Right? But in order to understand anyone fully, we have to understand all of them, and that is certainly true of religion. Because oftentimes people will make assumptions like Buddhism is always nonviolent. That's not the case. Right? As the picture on the left here indicates, these are Buddhist, monks in, in, excuse me, Myanmar, who are persecuting the Muslim minorities there. Does that mean that all Buddhists are violent? Certainly not. Right? But we can't possibly say that Buddhism teaches nonviolence all the time across time and space ever. Right? That's simply not the case because there are violent Buddhists or that, Islam oppresses women. Right? That's often a common assumption that people make about Islam. And yet here in this picture, you have, two, Muslim women, one who is looking at you and one who's looking away, at the women's march of twenty sixteen at this event that celebrated women's equality, and fought against patriarchy and female oppression. And here they are in their hijab. Right? Or one of them is in the hijab. The other one is in a coat. But, but here you have this this ubiquitous symbol of Islam, the the hijab, the the headscarf. And this woman is acting out her feminism. So when we try to just see religions in one dimension, we will inevitably miss very important parts of what it means to be those religions across the world in different contexts. So this is the problem of what we call essentialism. You'll remember a few slides back, I said that religions don't have essences. Right? And there is a problem with essentialism and assuming that they all have essences. Essentialism is the ancient philosophical view that the things we see in this world reflect unchanging forms or they have unchanging cores. Right? The principles for students of religion, though, is that religions are internally diverse. Even within one religious tradition in one time and space, there might be a variety of opinions on a variety of topics. They're not uniform. Right? They're not monoliths. And moreover, there is no true Islam, true Christianity, true Buddhism. There is in fact no Christianity at all. There are Christianities, many, many, many of them. Also, religions evolve and change over time. Being a Catholic in sixteenth century France was a very different experience than being a Catholic in Ecuador today or in Brooklyn, right? Religions change over time based on the various social, political, economic contexts that they find themselves in Because religions are, at least for the sake of this class, the way we're going to study them, they're human products. Religions, they may have, there may be gods or goddesses in the world, but we can't study them in an academic setting. What we can study are what people do. Right? And people change over time. People's circumstances and values and norms change over time, and so so do religions. Religious influences are also embedded in all dimensions of culture. As I said before, they don't exist over here in this little box on Sunday mornings. Right? They don't function in discrete or isolated or private contexts. Right? Religions are everywhere people are, which means that they're not just private. They're in public. They're not just in churches. Right? They're in government. They're not just in, you know, fill in the blank. They're everywhere people go. So let's talk a little bit about these isms. Right? And by isms, I mean the religion the names of the religions themselves. Isms do not exist. People exist. So, oftentimes, what I will tell students is that Christianity doesn't exist. And a lot of times students are like, I'm sorry. What? Yeah. It does. And that's fair. I understand the, the reaction, but what I'll often say is, okay. Show it to me. Hand it to me. Put Christianity in my hands, or point to it, or set it on the table. And inevitably, what would you do in that situation? Well, maybe you'd hand me a Bible, or maybe you'd show me a cathedral, or maybe you'd give me a picture of Jesus, or maybe you'd introduce me to your Christian friend, or your pastor, right, or your priest. In all of those situations, you haven't given me Christianity. You've given me a book, a person, a space, a place, a history. All of these things make up a thing called Christianity, but the thing itself doesn't exist. It's like a box that we put all of the aspects of a religion into, the stories and the rituals and the people and the the way that the, institutions are organized, and then we hold it all together. It's the swirling constellation of things, and then we stick a label on it, and we say Christianity or Islam or Hinduism. Right? But the important thing to realize here is that that itself is a process that's being done by scholars, right, by other people, that Christianity itself does not exist, but various parts of ways of acting and people and behaviors and histories, they do exist. So there are, three ways to avoid the dangers, right, of essentialism. It's important to be aware that we are producing the categories. Right? When I put that box there and I label it Christianity, I'm producing the box. The box itself doesn't exist. Right? I'm simply gathering things together and calling it a category. This is not unlike the way that librarians produce the Dewey Decimal System for categorizing books. Right? You've got a thousand books and you have no way of understanding how to organize them, so you create an organizational system. Right? But the Dewey Decimal system itself doesn't really have anything to do with what's in the books or the essence of the books. The authors who wrote the books, right, never cared about the Dewey Decimal system or the number that this book was going to get. Right? This is a construction made by librarians in order to organize the various books. So oftentimes, the isms are like Christianity or Hinduism or, Buddhism. Right? These are constructions constructed by people who study religion, by scholars of religion in order to make sense of a whole bunch of other behaviors and people and thoughts and practices. And so we can have something to talk about, so we can label it something so that we all know what we're talking about. It's also important to avoid bad generalizations. Right? Some generalization is okay and necessary in order to basically have, something to say. If we if we don't label something Christianity, right, then we'll just have this swirling unorganized mass of behaviors and texts and people. Right? It's somewhat necessary Dewey Decimal system, to create that organizing category in order for us to think through what it is to be a member of this community. But when we make bad generalizations, when we're not careful about the things we're observing, then that's how where we run into problems. And we also have to acknowledge to ourselves that the generalizations that we are making are just that. They're just generalizations. Right? So they are just broad statements about most things that we're talking about, certainly not all. So to review here, religions are not one. Right? They're not one thing. They're not eight paths of the same mountain. As nice and harmonious as that may sound to us, that is in fact not the case, and it will get in the way if we're trying to actually understand them. And they change. So perennialism is similar to essentialism. It's the assumption that there is one religion underlying what appears to be many religions. Right? This is the idea of the mountain. So a perennialist view is that the mountain is there, and all the different religions are just ways of getting up to the top of the mountain. The problem with this is that it, of course, ignores difference. So there are a lot of popular books, the Houston Smith one, for example, and many, many others that emphasize similarities rather than differences. But differences matter, and it's not wrong to call attention to differences. Right? Sometimes we are afraid to do that because we don't wanna create division. We don't wanna create conflict. Right? And and those are good intentions. But if all we look at is similarity, we won't see the things that really matter to the practitioners. So one analogy that I like to make about this is that perennialism is to religions as colorblindness is to race. So if you've ever heard someone say, oh, I don't see race. I'm colorblind. I try to treat everyone the same. Well, firstly, only white people say that. Right? Because it is the privilege of white people, to be the, to to often be the race that has the most power and protection. And so they can say things like, oh, no. No. I don't see race. I don't wanna see that. But what they're really saying is I don't want to see what makes you you I don't want to see difference I just want to pretend everybody's like me and of course that's it seems like it might come from a good place but it ends up being deeply respectful because we should see race we should see religious difference we should see all of the diversity and pluralism around us so that we can really understand what makes people who they are rather than simply just looking for all the things that makes them like me and only thinking about those things. So what we need today is not pretend pluralism, right, but clear eyed reality on what the world's religions are like when they are practiced on the ground. And we need to be brave in that way so that we're not afraid of sowing too much discord that we just pretend that everybody is like us. Right? Because we can study difference in a respectful and in a useful way and in a way that will actually help us better appreciate other people who are different from us far more than if we simply tried to pretend, that everyone was like us or if we only looked for similarities. Welcome back. This is the fourth and final part of the lecture for week two, why religion matters. I'm, again, professor Rees. So what I wanna continue with today is to ask the question, what is our job in this class? What is the goal of the class? Our job in the class is to understand religious people, practices, histories, traditions without necessarily explaining them away. So if you remember back to a previous slide where I gave you all the various definitions of religion, one of them was Karl Marx's definition that religion is the opium of the people. And another one was Sigmund Freud's definition of religion as being the neuroses of humanity or being mental illness. Both of those definitions are what we would call reductionist, meaning that they are reducing religion to other social factors or psychological factors in the case of Freud. What that means is that they are saying that religion itself is not a real thing. It's, simply the it's masquerading as neuroses or it's simply class structures, or a tool used by the oppressor to keep the oppressed oppressed. The problem with these definitions is not only would religious practitioners find them kind of offensive, but that they are explaining religion away. They're basically saying that none of the particulars of religion, the rituals, the stories, the histories or texts, none of those things actually really matter. They're just simply, clutter. And what religion really is is just, either neuroses or class oppression. So we're going to try to avoid definitions of religions that are reductionist in that way because they actually get in the way of our actually understanding what matters to religious practitioners and, and to religious communities. Instead, we're going to describe rather than define religious people, practices, traditions using their own terms and our scholarly critical analysis. So what I mean by that is that many of the definitions of religion that I gave you were attempting to say all religions are this thing. Right? For example, William James's idea that all religions are what individual people do in their solitude. Well, that might describe some religious, activity, but it certainly doesn't explain all of religion or doesn't describe all of religion. And so when we seek to define religions, we're engaging in a kind of universalizing process, which is problematic. So instead, we should aim to def describe religions and to describe what we see. Now when we describe religions, we are gonna try to describe them in their own terms, meaning that we're not gonna describe Catholicism as, the religion that doesn't care about bears. Right? Instead, we're going to define Catholicism in the terms that matter to Catholics. That said, we can also bring our outsider scholarly knowledge to the table, Meaning that, a religion may describe itself in one way, but we might look at it as a scholar from an outside perspective and see, oh, well, it's also lots of other things. So for example, a religious tradition might, describe its holy scripture as being handed down from the gods. Okay. Well, that's what the religious practitioners might believe about their holy scripture, and that may be important in understanding why it matters to them. But as religion scholars, we can also go through those holy and notice things like the language that the scripture is written in, the references to historical events that the scripture might make. And in which case, we might be able to make an argument that the scripture was written by particular people in a particular place, in a particular time, with a particular agenda. And that may go against what the religious practitioner claims. If the religious practitioner is saying that this scripture was written by gods, for example, we might show that no, actually, our scholarly opinion is that it was written by people who come from this time and place and who had this agenda. So sometimes the terms of the practitioner might, butt up against our scholarly analysis, but we need to have both in order to fully understand, what religions are all about. We can't simply take the word of practitioners as the truth. We have to take their words seriously, but also to hold it up against other things that we have access to, like our scholarly knowledge in terms of language and history. We're also going to bracket or epoche our own religious judgments. So what that means is that no matter what I do, I am going to bring certain assumptions and certain, beliefs of my own to the study of religion. And that's okay. I can't help it. No matter what I do, I'm going to, to bring a certain part of myself to my scholarly endeavor. But it's really important that I reflect on those assumptions that I am bringing to the table and how those assumptions might be influencing what I am studying and what I am writing down in my scholarship. So this means temporarily setting aside our judgments about the truth or falsehood of religious claims, and instead asking, what does this claim mean to the people who accept it? And knowing full well that we can always come back to our own convictions when we're done, when we take off our academic hat and we put on our regular person hat again. So for example, I personally, do not believe that, the prophet Mormon prophet Joseph Smith found magical plates in a hill in upstate New York, and that those plates were placed there by an ancient civilization. I don't personally believe that to be true. If I did, I should be a Mormon. Given that I'm not a Mormon, I don't believe that to have actually happened. But the problem is is if I keep that in my head at the very front of my mind, and all I'm thinking of is, well, this couldn't have possibly been true. That can sometimes get in the way of me understanding what Mormon life is like. I have to take my, my judgment that those things are not true and put them aside for the minute for a minute and ask instead, what does it mean for Mormons that they believe these things to be true? What does it mean to believe that these things are true? How would these things shape people's lives if they assumed them to be true? And that's something that we call bracketing. Now at the end of the day, I don't happen to believe that that's the case. I am not a Mormon. But I can set aside my own judgment about it in order to better understand what Mormon life is like, what their church is based on, and what their community is organized around. So you might be asking, if there's no accurate or universal definition of religion, then how do we even talk about it? If religion is, at the end of the day, just something, a system, a construction made up by scholars, and we're just putting all of these different, texts and behaviors and histories and people into a box and labeling it Islam or Mormonism or fill in the blank. Right? Then how do we even talk about religion? Well, we can do it three ways. We can talk about it descriptively, meaning that we can't necessarily define religion once and for all, but we can describe what people do in relationship to that which they consider sacred. So if a community of people considers the Book of Mormon to be sacred, right, I can describe what they do in relationship to that book. They read it. They take it seriously. They commit it to memory. They organize their family structures around it, etcetera, etcetera. So for example, we can describe that religious practitioners often speak of having experiences of transcendence or feeling connected in ways to extraordinary powers or presences. Right? So we can describe the way Catholics might experience taking the Eucharist and how it connects them to Christ, or we might explain, or describe how Hindu practitioners feel when they, do puja or they do their ritual devotion to their various gods. So we can describe what particular what practitioners say and do even if we're not necessarily defining Hinduism or Catholicism. We can also, study religions functionally, meaning that we can't necessarily say what religions are, but we can describe what they tend to do. So for example, religions often create and maintain social cohesion. Right? Religions help people to define who they are in relationship to other people and what kind of behaviors will be accepted by those people. Religions organize families. They organize, governments often. They organize various communities, and they hold those communities together through their rules, through their beliefs, and through their practices. We can also, describe religion or we can, talk about religion comparatively, meaning that all religions don't have one definition. Right? They're not eight paths up the same mountain. But we can say that different religions have family resemblances. And you can think about this, in terms of, a famous thinker talked about it in terms of games. Right? So tic tac toe and football are very different things. Right? Very different things. But we both we can group them together under the category of games. Right? And talk about what they might have in common. Even though we recognize that tic tac toe and football are extraordinarily different things, we can do the same thing with religions. We can say most religions have myths. Most most religions have rituals. Most religions have communal identities, and most of them relate to an ultimate concern or an inherent problem of the human condition or ultimate significance. And we can sort of create a category, that or a family, if you will, that we can then look at different religions in terms of their family resemblances. So rather than looking for one universal definition of religion, we might ask what are some common components. What makes up the family of religions? Well, myth certainly does. And by myth, I don't mean, untrue things. I don't mean false statements. I mean sacred stories that create and sustain communities. So when I talk about the creation myth in the Bible, for example, of the Garden of Eden, don't interpret me saying that, that that is a false story. Right? The truth or falsehood of the Adam and Eve story is not very important for the study of Christianity or Judaism. What matters is that how that story is used by those communities to create meaning and identity. So that's what myth does. Myth creates meaning and identity for the people who tell those stories. Similarly, with ritual, most religions have some kind of ritual practice. And what ritual is is that it's a practice that, transforms something sometimes into something else, or it's a practice that appears to do something that might look like a regular behavior, but it transcends that regular behavior into higher meaning. So what I mean by that is if you were to, simply not know anything about Catholicism and you were to watch the priest perform the ritual of the Eucharist, What you would see is a man who takes a a cracker or a piece of bread and some wine and says some words and then feeds those those that cracker and wine to the community of people who have gathered. But for Catholics, obviously, something very different is happening, something much more significant. The ritual of the Eucharist for Catholics transforms that body or that, bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ so that human beings can then eat the literal body and blood of Christ and experience a kind of oneness with Christ through this ritual. So the ritual itself is taking an everyday object, right, and giving it a great deal of religious significance, transforming it from something every day to something of ultimate significance. Also, religions have material cultures. Right? Religions exist in the world and they have stuff. There are lots of things, things and objects associated with religions. Right? Christians have Bibles. Catholics have Pibles and rosaries and crucifixes and, so on and so forth. Right? Jews have Shabbat candles and the Torah scrolls themselves. Hindus have all kinds of different objects that they use in their practice. So religions have material items and material culture as well as just ideas, beliefs, and, and doctrines. They also have symbols. Right? Symbols are things that are more than what they appear to be. And you can think of nonreligious symbols too. Like, think of the American flag. Right? And you can know something about people based on how they relate to those symbols. So for example, taking an American flag and, treating it with a great deal of respect might indicate certain values in that person. Whereas taking an American flag and say setting it on fire, right, might mean something very different to other people. May and we don't necessarily maybe know why they're doing that. Maybe they're doing it to make a political statement against a US policy of some kind, or maybe they're doing it to show that America is a place that's more than its symbols, that it's a constant it's a place that even allows for the burning of the flag. So depending on, what's going on in the actual symbol, right, and how people relate to the symbol, the symbol can mean very different things. Also, religions are communities. Right? You can't have a religion of one person. Right? You would inevitably have to have communities that get together and define themselves, with and against other communities. Religions also have authority structures, meaning that they have people who they, endow with various powers or whose powers they recognize. Right? So for Catholics, the authority figures might be the priests or the bishops or the, ultimately, the pope. For Buddhists, the authority, might come from, monks, who are teachers of the various, teachings of Buddhism, the dharma. Similarly, all religions seem to have what Paul Tillich, Tillich is a, religious studies scholar, have a ultimate concern, meaning that they have a problem of the human condition that they are trying to solve. And those problems differ religion to religion. So for example, for Christianity, the problem is the sinfulness of the human soul. And the ultimate concern is how that human soul can be saved, how it can avoid eternal damnation, and how it can enjoy, eternal life, with God in heaven. So the ultimate concern of Christianity is the salvation of the human soul, and it has a solution to that ultimate concern, meaning the redemptive death of Jesus. Right? Other religions have different ultimate concerns. Buddhist ultimate concern is how to escape Samsara. Samsara is the endless cycle of birth and rebirth and death and rebirth and redeath and the inevitable suffering that goes with all of that. That's the Buddhist ultimate concern. And so what is the answer to that problem? Well, the answer to that problem is the teachings of the Buddha. And if you follow the teachings of the Buddha, you can reach Nirvana or escape from that, that constant cycle of reincarnation. So different religions have very different ultimate concerns, but most religions have a ultimate concern. The book that you're reading for this class, The Religion Matters, the Prothro text, also identifies a kind of four part model for the study of the world's religions. Meaning that it takes an analysis of a human problem, like, the sinfulness of humanity or samsara. Right? It then provides a solution to that problem. Right? The acceptance of Jesus Christ and the taking of various sacraments, etcetera, etcetera, or the teachings of the Buddha. Then it usually has techniques for achieving that goal. Right? So what do you do? You you say certain prayers. You do certain rituals. You study certain principles, etcetera, etcetera. And then, of course, there are exemplars, who chart a path toward that goal, meaning that you have the, the people who have achieved the goal. In Buddhism, that exemplar is the Buddha. And in different forms of Buddhism, it might also be, entities called Bodhisattvas that we'll learn more about when we get to the Buddhism unit. For Christianity, it might be, Jesus himself, or it might be, the apostles, or it might be saints, people who have achieved that particular goal through the techniques. Other options for describing religion include something like, that's called the four c's. These are creed, code, cultists, and community. What these words mean is that creeds are the established belief or truths that the religion holds. So a creed of Christianity is that Jesus was the son of God. Right? A creed, of Buddhism is that Samsara can be escaped by, achieving, by following the Dharma. Right? The four noble truths and the eightfold path. You don't have to worry about that right now. We'll get to that in the Buddhism unit. Then religions also have codes, meaning they have rules on how to live and how to behave. Right? One Buddhist code might be to be, nonviolent, or a code for Christianity might be to avoid certain behaviors that they consider sinful, Or a code for Judaism might be keeping kosher, for example. So these are rules on how to live one's life in relationship to other people and in relationship to the divine. Cultist, sounds like the word cult, which can be a misleading term. Cult is a very charged word that usually translates to religion we don't like very much, but we'll talk more about that in a little bit. But cultists refers to the practices that express and reinforce the creeds and the codes, meaning that if you have a creed that Jesus is the son of God and you have a code or behaviors that you're supposed to do or not do, right, a cultist, practice might be something like taking the Eucharist, which reinforces the idea that Jesus is the son of God and reinforces the, the various rules and codes that you're supposed to live by. And then finally, community. As I said before, even though William James defined religion as individuals in their solitude, religions don't seem to be entities of just one lonely person. They tend to bind people together. And so these are one this is one way of describing religion, the four c's. Another way of defining religion, or a description rather, because we're gonna aim at description rather than, definitions, is that a religion can be understood as a system of symbols, the creed, the code, and the cultists, by means of which people, the community, orient themselves in the world with reference to both ordinary and extraordinary powers, meanings, and values. So this is one description of religion put forward by the religion scholar, Catherine Albanese. Another description of religion that we might find useful are the seven definite seven dimensions rather of religion put forward by another religion scholar, Ninian Smart. And these are the seven definitions that Ninian Smart identified or rather def dimensions. I keep saying the wrong word. The seven different dimensions of religion. And you can see here some of the things we've already talked about, like material culture. Right? The ordinary objects or extraordinary objects in a religion, the ethical or legal precepts of a religion, the emotional or experiential parts of a religion, the ritual forms, the narratives or myths. Sometimes those are written down in a holy scripture, and sometimes they're just oral. And then the social and institutional dimensions of a religion. How is a religion organized? Who are the authority figures? And what is their relationship to the regular people? And so on. Right? And then, of course, you have the doctrinal or philosophical dimension of a religion. We might call these the creeds. Right? The truths that these religions, put forward. So this is one way of thinking about religion. So let's review what we've covered this week. Religions do not have essences. Right? There is no one true version of, Islam, or Christianity. Right? Religions, do not have cores that stay put over time or that remain forever and ever. They're also not just different paths up the same mountain. Right? Meaning that they're not all part of one universal truth. This may make us feel better about living in the pluralistic religious community, and it may even be something that we find useful in keeping the peace, between religions that might have problems with one another. But if we wanna really understand religions, we can't see them as, eight paths up the same mountain or ten paths up the same mountain. We have to see them for all of their differences, not the things that they just have in common. Also, religions are internally diverse. Right? Not only are there many, many different kinds of Christianity, but there's also many, many different kinds of just being Mormon, for example. Right? There isn't one definition of what it is to be a Mormon or what it is to be a Buddhist. Right? There's lots of internal diversity, internal debate, and internal discussion about what these religions mean and how people should live them out. Also, they change over time. Right? Being a Catholic in, in, you know, contemporary Los Angeles is very different than being a Catholic in the fifth century, for example. Right? Not only are there new doctrines, and new texts, but, just the practice, the way of of practicing one's religion is going to change based on where one is and what are the other contexts that are influencing one's life. What are the political realities of someone's life? What are the economic realities? All of those different things are going to influence how they live out their religion. Isms don't exist. Right? There is no such thing as Buddhism. Right? There are Buddhists. There are people who do things in, in Buddhist sort of ways. Right? And so this is important to realize that that there isn't one way of being Buddhist, because there is no thing called Buddhism. Right? There are just people who do certain things and that we then as scholars label as, well, this is Buddhism. Or even individual practitioners might label something as Buddhism, but there is no actual discrete thing called Buddhism. I cannot hold Buddhism in my hands. Right? And as far as we're concerned in this class, religions, or at least the parts of them we can study, are human products. Now does that mean that I'm saying that, you know, God doesn't exist or that reincarnation isn't real. No. I'm not necessarily saying that. What I'm saying is that if God exists or gods exist or if, Vishnu exists or if Jesus was, more than just a human person. I can't study that. I don't have access to that as a scholar. I can't, observe it or measure it or learn about it. Right? What I can learn about are the people who believe that those things are true or the people who do certain things in relationship to those gods or goddesses. And so religions, as far as we're concerned, are the human products. Now they may reference something superhuman or supernatural, but insofar as we can study them, religions are produced and maintained and sustained by people. So that's what we're going to focus on is understanding the people. Okay. So that wraps up our week, week two, why religion matters. And next week, we will get into an actual religion, into the study of Hinduism. If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to either send me an email or a text or drop into my Zoom office hour where we can have a conversation on Tuesdays, at ten thirty, five to eleven thirty five. Okay. I hope to hear from you. Always been jealous of academics who have fancy job titles like sociologist or archaeologist. They just sound so cool. But what do you do when you study religion? Am I a religiologist? Well, one of the reasons why this is even an issue is because religious studies, the academic discipline draws from multiple methods. From anthropology, from sociology, and even some of the hard sciences like neuroscience. Bringing all of these tools to the table to study the single subject, religion. So what are some of the main approaches to the academic study of religion and how do they differ? Let's start with the sociological approach to religion. Sociology is the scientific study of society, including the structures, interactions, and collective behavior of human beings. And if we're talking about collective human behavior, religion is a great example. So it shouldn't surprise you some of the foundational thinkers of sociology studied religion. Emile Durkheim in his book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, tried to describe the origins and function of religion in society. Sociologist Max Weber analyzed the role religion played in economic and social structures with his essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And although later studies are a little more sophisticated than Durkheim and Weber, these scholars continue to shape the sociological study of religion. Modern sociologists such as Nancy Ammerman at Boston University study the social structures and practices of religion as it's practiced in daily life. Asking questions like, how do new religious movements form? Why do humans participate in communal ritual? And how do factors like gender, race, and ethnicity all influence religious identity? Studies like these use a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools like analyzing demographic data, conducting surveys, in person interviews, or even archival research. But all of these tools combine to identify and analyze religion as it functions in society. But while guys like Durkheim and Weber were studying the intersection of religion and society, scholars like Freud were taking a psychological approach to religion. Studying how the human mind, our thoughts, our emotions, and even the biological processes of our brain influence religious belief and practice. Now, Freud famously compared religious rituals to obsessive compulsive behavior in his essay, obsessive actions and religious practices. But modern scholars have generally debunked his more eccentric approaches to religion while at the same time building on his methodology of focusing on the human brain. Some of these studies take a more Freudian approach to religion like Princeton Emeritus professor Gananath Obviousekare, who uses psychoanalytical methods when studying the religions of his home country Sri Lanka. Other scholars take a more cognitive science approach. Pascal Boyer, for example, a professor of anthropology and psychology at Washington University Saint Louis, applies the study of evolutionary psychology to religion. In his book, Religion Explained, he argues that the tendency towards religion is hardwired into the human brain and you'll notice this sounds a lot like the hard sciences. Contemporary figures in the scientific study of religion include Dimitri Zygilatas, who measures different levels of hormone production and extreme rituals, and Patricia Sharp, who studies the neural underpinnings of meditation and mindfulness. What unites this research in the scientific study of religion is not so much a single methodology, but a tendency to emphasize reductionism and explanation. During the eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume argued that religious beliefs and behaviors could be explained naturalistically without an appeal to theological explanations or personal spiritual experience. This simple idea has formed the core of the scientific study of religion. That religion can be explained using the tools that we use to analyze any other aspect of human behavior. So at this point you might be asking yourself, well, why do we even need to bother having a separate discipline called religious studies? And one reason why this is the case is because religion is just too complex for one discipline to manage. Remember, religion is embedded in all aspects of culture. Our art, our politics, our literature, gender, race, ethnicity, all influence it. Religious studies demands an interdisciplinary approach and it demands scholars and students who are able to apply different methods to the study of religion, but none of these approaches are mutually exclusive. You can be an anthropologist of religion who uses psychological approaches. You can be a historian of religion who also uses archaeological data like myself. But this is actually an advantage to religious studies because different approaches ask different questions and reveal different sets of data. So whether you're a biologist or have interest in philosophy or politics, you probably can find a home in religious studies. As always, thanks for watching. The no true Scotsman fallacy is one of the most common mistakes I see in discussions about religion. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm gonna act it out for you. Imagine a conversation between two Scotsmen. No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. Well, my cousin is Scottish, and I'm a hundred percent sure that he puts sugar on his porridge. Well, he is not a true Scotsman. It's a goalpost moving fallacy. A person makes a generalized statement about Scottish identity, but must amend their perspective as soon as they're presented with evidence that contradicts their preconceived notion of what Scottishness is. I see this all the time in discussions about religion. See if you can spot the similarities. Buddhism is a peaceful religion, but the Buddhist leader, Ashinorathu, has famously inflamed hatred against the Muslim population of Myanmar and has been banned from Facebook for hate speech and inciting violence. John Oliver did a whole piece on this. You should watch it. Well, he is not a true Buddhist. Notice what happened here. This is classic no true Scotsman fallacy territory. Many people have their own preconceived notion of a particular religion and how that religion should act, but dismiss any evidence that's at odds with those preconceptions. I'm using the example of Buddhism because it might be less familiar to you, but you can probably see where I'm going with this. This comes up again and again in debates about Islam, with people who are prejudiced against Muslims saying that violence is baked into the system, that true Islam is violent, and well meaning defenders saying that groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are not true Muslims. I think that the Harvard Religious Literacy Project has a good response to this debate, That religions are internally diverse. That a system like Buddhism is complex enough that this guy and this Hollywood actor can both fall under the label of Buddhist. These are authentic expressions of a particular religion, and some of these authentic expressions are morally abhorrent. Some of these authentic expressions defy our stereotypes of these religions, but we shouldn't deny that they're authentic expressions in the first place. Admitting that Ashunto is a Buddhist does not condone his violence. Admitting that he is a Buddhist does not indict all of Buddhism as a warmongering violent system. In fact, recognizing his Buddhist identity might enable us to understand him and his movement. Policing which expression of a religion is true or not is more like a theological argument. It's not unlike early Christians debating between which Christianity is orthodox and which Christianity is heresy. This is an insider's debate. It's not exactly an academic debate. So here are two takeaways. Number one, religions are diverse. Trying to boil down a particular religion to an essential true Buddhism or true Islam is just not helpful, and it's just not accurate with what we see on the ground. In the words of the religion scholar Joseph Laycock, unchallenged the no good Scotsman argument is very effective for belief perseverance. That's to say our tendency to continue to believe something when presented with convincing contradictory evidence. The second takeaway is, and I'm also crediting the Religious Literacy Project for this, peace or violence are not inevitable. Religion can certainly be an ideology that people use to legitimize their violence, but peace or violence can't be baked in. To argue that is a form of no true Scotsman fallacy, trying to find an essential Islam or essential Buddhism that can never be replicated or identified in the messy complicated world that is known as humanity. I'd like to end by drawing your attention to this really cool video published by Harvard that illustrates the complexity of religions by asking the question, who is a Muslim? And then in rapid fire images, they post pictures of different people who identify as Muslim. It's a really cool exercise to try to capture the diversity of religion in just a few seconds. Link is in the description below. And as always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Know when you're sitting on an airplane and the person next to you starts chatting with you, the inevitable question comes up. So what do you do for a living? Now I really don't like this question. It's pretty easy if you can say, oh yeah, I'm a barista at Starbucks. But I have to look at them and say, I study religion. So after this exchange, two things usually happen. The conversation either gets shut down immediately after that. Oh, religion. That's awkward. I'm sorry I even asked. Either that or I become the resident expert expert on theological topic a or theological topic b. Oh, you study religion? So do you think Adam and Eve are real people? Oh, you study religion? Do you think Jesus is fully god and fully human? Trust me. It's really awkward being mistaken as a priest. Now I think these awkward situations stem from a fundamental misunderstanding on what religious studies is as an academic discipline. Spoiler alert, theology and religious studies are different. Very different. David Ford, professor of theology at Cambridge University, defines theology as thinking about questions raised by and about religion. These questions include questions about meaning or beauty or truth or best practices and how we live our lives. And often how these questions of meaning, beauty, and truth pertain to the divine or god or the transcendent. Whatever your specific tradition believes. So for example, Buddhism posits some propositions. All life is suffering. The source of suffering is desire. To stop suffering you must rid yourself of desire. And you do this by following the eight fold path. So the Buddhist theologian would try to answer these questions raised by these propositions. How do we reach Nirvana? Can you still release yourself from suffering by holding on to material wealth? So that's theology at its most basic. It's God talk. It's trying to answer the questions that a particular faith raises. And theology is often self critical and self reflective. So a Christian theologian would try to contribute to the tradition of Christianity, while a Buddhist theologian would contribute to the tradition and communities of Buddhism. Academic theology of this nature is often called confessional theology. The audience of such theology would be fellow insiders of the faith community as the theologian critiques or encourages members of that belief system. Now secular universities also have theology departments and we wouldn't necessarily call these confessional. They don't necessarily advocate a particular religion, but they conduct in-depth analysis of religious beliefs and how they pertain to society at large. Thinking about questions raised by and about religion doesn't necessarily mean that you're a devoted believer yourself. Now on the other hand, religious studies is a different academic discipline. Religious studies is not inherently interested in the questions that a certain religion raises, but rather religious studies focuses on the human dimension of religion. Rather the community rituals, politics, and texts that humans have made that all tie back to religion. So let's use our Buddhism example again. A Buddhist religious studies expert wouldn't ask questions like how do we release ourselves from suffering? They would ask questions like what was it about East Asia in the sixth century BCE that gave rise to this idea of suffering? What effects do Buddhist beliefs and practices have on society? Or why is the population of Buddhism populations of Christianity and Islam are rising in the twenty first century? Now notice how these questions differ from our earlier questions. They aren't so much focused on the divine or the transcendent, but rather focused on the human processes of religion. Jay z Smith, who I mentioned last episode in this series, puts it this way. Religion is an inextricably human phenomenon. Religious studies are therefore most appropriately described in relation to the humanities and the human sciences, in relation to anthropology rather than theology. So this means scholars of religious studies focus the tools of the humanities and the natural sciences onto religion, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, history. There are even some really interesting studies from neuroscientists and psychologists all bringing their expertise to bear on religion and how it functions as a human phenomenon. Now, of course, there is always going to be some overlap. I don't wanna set up some false dichotomy and say, oh, all theologians are biased and all religious studies scholars are perfectly neutral. Theologians also rely on anthropology and sociology in their research. And some religious studies scholars are religious themselves and must try to bracket their religious belief to remain neutral and unbiased in their research. Theologians can wear both hats and they often have joint appointments at theology and religion departments at secular universities. Rather than a biased versus neutral dichotomy, let's just say theology and religious studies ask different questions, and our method of research differ in many ways. Now religion for breakfast is an unapologetically religious studies channel. That is to say, you'll never see a video on this channel asking what is the nature of God? These are questions for theologians to answer because they are questions raised by specific religions. We are focused on the human dimension of religion because that's what religion is, a wildly complex reflection of human thought and desires and actions that have manifested themselves over thousands of years of human history. I just wish I could more succinctly explain that to the guy on the airplane. As always, thanks for watching and subscribing, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. If you like what you see, feel free to subscribe or check out our newly launched Patreon page if you'd like to become a financial backer of the show. Our last episode in the religion one zero one series where we tried to define religion actually generated some pretty good discussion. One subscriber really liked Tyler's definition of religion that all religion is somehow belief in supernatural beings. But I would argue that not all religion requires belief in supernatural beings. Someone that doesn't define themselves as religious, but they still believe in karma, or they still believe in like an aura or energy field. None of this is really theistic, and even though they would say they're spiritual but not religious, this is still religion on some level. So I would push back against this idea that all religion requires belief in supernatural beings. Maybe belief in something that's supernatural or trans empirical, but not necessarily beings. This all goes to show how difficult it is to define religion. No matter what your definition is, you can almost always find an exception. So this is where the family resemblances definition comes in handy because it doesn't require every religion to fit into your definition. Feel free to comment on this current video and I'll try my best to answer your questions next episode. Thanks again. Hi. Welcome back. This week, we are jumping into our first world religious tradition, Hinduism, which Stephen Prothrow refers to as the way of devotion. Hinduism is a tricky religion to start with because in some ways, Hinduism poses a challenge to all the contemporary or traditional definitions of religion. Hinduism is decentralized, meaning that, there isn't one Hinduism. There are many Hinduisms, which is true of all religions, but it becomes particularly clear in Hinduism. It has no creed, no catechism, no established set of doctrines. There is no founder, unlike Judaism, which had draws its founders from Moses and the first Israelites, like Abraham and so on, or Buddhism, which has the Buddha. Islam has Muhammad. Christianity has has Jesus. Hinduism doesn't have a founder. There's also no single living religious leader, like the pope, say, for Catholicism. There are many religious leaders within Hinduism, but no one claims domination over all Hindus, for example. And there's no official authority, to proclaim who is in or who is out. There's no, council. There is no pope. There is no, imams. There are no authority figures to say you are Hindu, or you are not Hindu, or you are Hindu in the right way, or you are Hindu in the wrong way. So we can see that Hinduism is very difficult to pin down. In fact, the word Hinduism, which was first spelled with two o's by outsiders, Hinduism was first coined in eighteen thirty, that recently, under British occupation to mean the various religious traditions in India. Now the word Hindu has a much longer history. Certainly, it was not invented in eighteen thirty. But the word Hindu, evolved over, several, hundred years to refer to the group of people who just lived in India. It didn't have any religious connotation whatsoever until eighteen thirty. So we can see that Hinduism is very difficult to define. For the most part, you're Hindu if you're born into a Hindu family, and to be born into a Hindu family is to be Hindu. So in this way, Hinduism is not a missionary religion. Hindus are not going to knock on your door and, ask you to consider Krishna the way that Mormons would knock on your door or Jehovah's Witnesses would knock on your door. Similarly, Hinduism can't even be described as polytheistic or monotheistic. It's both, many religions and one religion all at once. And it's not exclusivist, meaning that you can be a Hindu and also practice, Buddhist practices. You could even be a Hindu and a Christian, and the most Hindus probably wouldn't have a problem with that. Now your Christian community might have a problem with that. You're worshiping the, the Hindu gods, but there is no one or no mechanism in Hinduism to say excommunicate you for participating in other religions. So how do we think about Hinduism? How do we wrap our head around this, religion that seems to defy all of our, useful descriptions and definitions of what a religion is? Well, sometimes we think about religions like a tree. Say, for example, let's take Christianity. Christianity begins with, well, it begins with Judaism, but it begins with, Jesus and Paul, and then it eventually builds into, the the religion of the Roman Empire, and it becomes sort of an established church religion, and then it branches. And you get Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. And then later on, Catholicism branches into, Protestantism and Catholicism. And then Protestantism branches into Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and Unitarians and so on and so forth. And each one of those groups, is an exclusivist group. You're not a Presbyterian and a Unitarian. You're not a Mormon and a Baptist. You are one or the other. And that's how we sometimes think about religious denominations and religious groups. Hinduism is different. So I would suggest that instead of thinking in terms of branches and denominations and sects like the tree, instead, we should think about it in terms of rock formations or a geological model. So if you see here on the right this image of, this layered rock formation. And for Hinduism, this is the way that, religious practice functions. It begins with a foundational layer, that we call the Vedic religions. And then on top of that, classical Hinduism emerges. And then on top of that, the Bhakti tradition emerges. And then on top of that, and on top of that, and on top of that. And what's interesting is that none none of those layers define themselves against the other layers. They don't branch out and separate the way that leaves or branches of a tree would. Instead, they just build on each other, and they're all considered Hinduism. They're all practiced by Hindus, and they're all part of the same tradition. So I suggest that when we're thinking about Hinduism, we should try to think in terms of this kind of geological model rather than a kind of evolutionary model or a branching model. So here's a timeline for some context. Here I've put all of the various world religious traditions on a timeline so you can see how they relate to one another. And I'll bring this slide back up as we encounter other religious traditions throughout the class. But what you'll see here in pink is that Hinduism represents the oldest of the continuous religious traditions. The ancient Greek and Roman religions, don't come close. The only thing that comes close is ancient Egyptian religion, which of course is no longer practiced. But you'll also notice that that pink line is somewhat divided around the five hundred BCE mark, and that's because that's when a layer of Hinduism gets added to the first layer, which is the Vedic religions. Around five hundred BCE, new religious texts emerge called the Upanishads, and that adds that second layer of Hinduism. And so and there are other layers as well, but that is a very, foundational shift that occurs. But we put it all on the same timeline because Vedic religions and, classical, Hinduism and the Bhakti tradition, which I'll talk about in the moment in a moment, are all still practiced simultaneously within Hinduism. One doesn't necessarily exclude the others. So just to review very very broadly, roughly Hindu history here, we start with Vedic religions, and those are based on a a series of texts called the Vedas. And the Vedas are the oldest text in Hinduism. Sometimes we call this proto Hinduism because we don't even like to use the word Hinduism to describe Vedic religions since the word Hinduism, did not was not in use when the Vedic religions alone were being practiced. Then we move into the classical traditions, and these new texts begin to emerge. I've listed them here, but the one of the most important that you have to, you have to consider is the Upanishads. And we'll talk more about the importance of the Upanishads as we move throughout these lectures. On top of that, you get the Bakhti tradition. This is devotional Hinduism. This is when, the individual, devotional prayers and, rituals toward your particular deity, get established. And there are millions and millions of Hindu deities. Many of them are considered avatars, not like the movie, or, reflections of the, one deity, the one singular deity Brahmin, or others are avatars of particular deities like Shiva or, or Vishnu. Then moving into the modern period, we enter into the era of British colonization and occupation. This was a particularly difficult time in Indian history. The British colonial period and occupation of India was particularly brutal on the native population, and it completely shifted the way many, Hindus practice their religion and thought about their religion because all of a sudden they had to justify their religion to their British Christian occupiers, and they had to define themselves in British Western Christia