In comparison to this view Marxists see society as promoting the interests of the ruling class and legitimating suffering and therefore preventing social change. In Marx’s words religion is the “opiate of the people” which makes their working class life more bearable. Feminists also agree that religion serves the interest of the powerful, however they believe this supports the social structure of patriarchy and legitimates women’s subordinate position. For example this is seen through Hinduisms support of arranged marriages and the Catholic Church’s banishment of abortion. In contrast Weber’s views suggest that religion has acted as a powerful force of social change.
Durkheim believed that the essence of all religion could be found by studying it’s simplest form, in the simplest type of society. He studied totems, which he said was a society worshipping sacred symbols and rituals which were meant to symbolize all of society. In Durkheim’s view, sacred symbols represent society’s collective conscience or consciousness. The collective conscience is the shared norms and values of society. For Durkheim shared religious rituals reinforced the collective conscience and maintain social integration.
The Industrial Revolution was rejected by the conservatives because it brought more power to the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, while it weakened the nobles. Liberalism embraced the Industrial Revolution, as it was considered the “bourgeois liberalism”. Religiously, they were very different as well. Conversatism favored a well established, powerful church (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox), and believed the Enlightenment had brought violence upon the Catholic church. There wasn’t much separation between church and state.
Especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, crime, racial tensions, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and the danger of war. For Social Darwinism, wealth, social status, and property indicated a persons fitness to survive.While Social Gospel taught its followers to push for political reforms, while followers of social Darwinism disapproved of anything that the government did to help protect the weak. Due to Darwinism, poor people were seen as lazy, inferior, and less fit to survive. It appealed to the Protestant work ethic that anyone could prosper with hard work, intelligence, and perseverance. It supported the idea of laissez-faire policies of which the government should not regulate the marketplace or attempt social reform.
The religion of Christianity promoted enlightened people to question the ideology of their God and lean more towards a scientific method in order to look at the world around them. The church used superstition, threats of eternal damnation, and promises of heaven, to control masses of ignorant people in Europe, since the time of the crusades. It represented a wealthy capitalist organization, like a huge cooperation, exploiting the spiritual needs common to many humans especially at that time period. A great example of how Christianity stifled social change is the idea that the earth was the center of the solar system. Astronomers such as Galileo knew that the sun was the center rather than the earth, but the church suppressed new ideas and new information from reaching the people.
Furthermore, proposed indirect taxes on luxury goods such as motor cars and petrol would have affected the Lords as they were among the few rich enough to afford such luxuries. The Lords set up a budget protest league and denounced the budget as “confiscation and robbery”, and breaking with convention overwhelmingly vetoed the budget. A less important reason was that the Lords believed the budget amounted to a social revolution. They were worried by the idea of progressive and redistributive taxation which taxes the rich more heavily. They feared once these principles were established they could be extended to ‘soak the rich’ and even out the unfair distribution of wealth in Edwardian Britain.
(Aldridge, 2005, p.60) Marx found what he believed to be a full explanation of religion in Ludwig Feuerbach’s work entitled ‘The Essences of Christianity’. The argument set forth by Feuerbach was that God was an extension of humanity; therefore Christianity was the vehicle to fulfil aspirations for perfection. Thus, the masses, in their worship of God, could project their wishes onto benevolent supernatural being. (Aldridge, 2005, p. 61) According to Karl Marx in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of the heartless world, the soul in a place without soul. It is the opium of the people”.
These three different perspectives are the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist perspectives, and are the most commonly used views by sociologists. These three concepts can be used to explain the sociological effects religion can hold. Functionalists tend to view society as a living organism, in the sense that all aspects of society contribute to its survival. The functionalist perspective emphasizes the importance of the way parts of society are structured to maintain the stability (Schaefer, 2011). Religion for a functionalist would be viewed as more of a reinforcement for the values that society holds.
Let knowledge be a cosmic and complex structure, faith is the base for this structure for it provides fundamental assumptions and without these assumptions, the structure of knowledge will disintegrate. In the first Area of Knowledge religion, faith does play a pivotal role. Faith is an essential element that is mostly inseparable from the religion. An organized religion usually consists of a person’s relationship to that which they regard as holy, sacred,
Religion and Violence According to the Harvard Divinity School, “Religion is a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices that serves the purpose of establishing rules and principles in a society”. When studying various religions, it becomes credible that the principles instilled are those that are morally “just”. Every major religion specifically addresses the issue of violence, and the vast majority condemns such actions. Individuals following a particular religion are expected to follow the rules and principles established which should create a world that is morally righteous and free from violence. For this instance, this is not the case, society must constantly correct immoral actions performed by certain individuals.