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The classic anthropological analysis of religion from a pioneer in the field From the preface:
“Scientific efforts to learn just what are the forms and functions of religion have not been few; it is the purpose of this book to review some of them and to synthesize the suggestions and findings. . . . My own personal feeling is that sociological viewpoints (including much of social anthropology) tend to focus on the scaffolding and milieu of religion rather than on religion itself and that religion can be best understood from a combination of psychological and cultural points of view. . . . This book is not, I think, motivated by a need to destroy, by dissection, a way of thinking and acting that many educated people feel is of little use, or is even disadvantageous, in a world increasingly committed to the search for scientific and technological solutions of human problems. Rather, I aim to preserve a friendly detachment in the asking of fundamental scientific questions about religion.”
The classic anthropological analysis of religion from a pioneer in the field From the preface:
“Scientific efforts to learn just what are the forms and functions of religion have not been few; it is the purpose of this book to review some of them and to synthesize the suggestions and findings. . . . My own personal feeling is that sociological viewpoints (including much of social anthropology) tend to focus on the scaffolding and milieu of religion rather than on religion itself and that religion can be best understood from a combination of psychological and cultural points of view. . . . This book is not, I think, motivated by a need to destroy, by dissection, a way of thinking and acting that many educated people feel is of little use, or is even disadvantageous, in a world increasingly committed to the search for scientific and technological solutions of human problems. Rather, I aim to preserve a friendly detachment in the asking of fundamental scientific questions about religion.”
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
I
Introduction: Some General Theories of Religion
New religions are constantly being born. From the most ancient of archaeological records, from the history of the most recent past, and from the millennia in between, rises a ceaseless clamor of new faiths. Every year, about the globe, dozens of new cults add their voices to the cry. They are rarely faiths unique in doctrine and ritual; almost invariably they are composed for the most part of pieces and patterns of older, more routinized, more conservative religions. Their newness resides in an attitude of their membership: their members—few or many—are once-disillusioned, newly inspired people who have forsaken the ways of the world about them, and have banded together to build what they believe will be better selves and a better world. Rarely indulged by the old religions, the new are variously ignored, sneered at, or violently suppressed; a few survive, grow, and become old religions. But all old religions were new religions once.
How many religions has mankind produced? If we say that one religion, as an entity, is distinct from another when its pantheon, its ritual, its ethical commitments, and its mythology are sufficiently different for its adherents to consider that the adherents of other religions are, in a general sense, “unorthodox” or “pagans” or “nonbelievers,” then we must conclude that mankind has produced on the order of 100,000 different religions. This figure is based on several assumptions: first, that religion began with the Neanderthals, who about 100,000 years ago were carefully burying their dead with grave goods and building small altars of bear bones in caves; second, that there have been at all times since the Neanderthals a thousand or more culturally distinct human communities, each with its own religion; and third, that in any cultural tradition, religions change into ethnographically distinct entities at least every thousand years. Religion is a universal aspect of human culture. Furthermore, for every religion which has survived and been routinized, either as a small community faith or a “great religion” such as Christianity or Islam, there are dozens of abortive efforts by untimely prophets, victims of paranoid mental disorders, or cranks which are ignored or suppressed by the community.
If we understood the process by which new religions come into being, we should be close to understanding other basic processes of human life. New religions have been the inexhaustible fountains from which, for thousands of years, have flowed, in turbulent variety of form and color, the waters which make up the sea of faith. That sea has nourished much of man’s still-infant culture—not merely his theological belief and sacred ritual, but his values, his principles of social organization, even his technology. And it is man’s capacity to create new religions that in large measure has made all chronicles of individual and social behavior chronicles of cyclical decline and renaissance. For new religions are, above all else, movements toward the revitalization of man and society. Periodically, new religions reverse the course of decline by supplying the energy and direction for a new, and often higher, climax of development. Once a plateau has been reached, of course, religion functions as a kind of governor for society, stabilizing its members and correcting the tendency of institutions to wobble or drift. And even when a religion becomes old and crabbily conservative, it will still, despite the reluctance of its priesthood, provide...
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Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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