"District of Columbia Project ." 12 12 2009. www.dc.gov. Project Web. 27 09 2013. . Thompson, Anthony J.
Phenomenology is also geared towards creating a framework for understanding religious traditions. The authors of The Sacred Quest An Invitation to the Study of Religion give multiple outlines for different things in religion, such as what a cult is defined as and what it means for something to be sacred. The phenomenological approach’s function is to also put up a firewall against literalism. This means that we want to look at how things function in a religion and how things are interpreted but we do not want to make the mistake of believing some things actually happened in the physical world. We use the phenomenological approach as a way to interpret data that we observe from several different religions.
Analyse Hick’s vale of soul making theodicy. (30 marks) John Hick’s vale of soul making theodicy is a modern form of the Irenaean theodicy. This theodicy argues that both natural and moral evil are important, so they have a good purpose and therefore an all loving God is justified in allowing evil. Hick claimed that God had made humans morally imperfect to help them complete the process of creation themselves. He argues that humans are made in the image of God with the potential to accomplish perfection in the future, and then humans will then grow to become the likeness of God.
The argument from religious experience states that if we can experience God, then surely God must exist because what we experience must be real. There are many philosophers that try to explain this but the one I am going to focus on in this essay is William James. James defines religious experience as though it should be the primary topic in the study if religion rather than religious institutions, since institutions are merely the social descendent of genius. He also defines a religious experience as, 'The feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatsoever they may consider divine.’ To James a prominent feature of religious experience is mysticism. He says, '...propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical...' The marks to which he is referring to are inefficiently, notices quality, transiency and passivity.
The individual sees religion performing a significant function allowing them to feel apart of society and seeing that religion strengthens us to face life's trials and motivates us to overcome obstacles that would otherwise overpower us. Durkheim used the religion of Aborigines to develop his argument. He calls their religion 'totemism', as each clan of aborigines had a sacred symbol called a totem which was a symbol of their gods and of their society. Therefore, he argues the people are really worshipping society. However, Durkheim's analysis has been criticised as he only looked at small pre-industrial societies so his views do not apply to complex modern societies.
[ 2 ]. Ibid. [ 3 ]. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 91,
The Nature of Religion Kathy Legare rel/134 May 10 2012 University of Phoenix The Nature of Religion Describe the common elements of religion. An important element in a religion is to have a Supreme Being or person to worship. Where this supreme being(s) guides and teach people how to live. That does not help or hinder the control of the nature of mankind. (Johnson, 2009) There is an unwritten code that religions have that tells the believer how to live, how to bring more in to the religion and what do if the person does not want to believe.
For the Puritans, who have such a high influence in religion and in God, their science was meshed with religion as well. Winthrop believed that nature was created by God, and thus the Puritans' way of the science was more of an act of worship. On the other hand, Franklin was a discoverer. He wanted to find out how things work and how they evolve and end up. Franklin wants to understand the nature not the belief that God created nature ideas by the Puritans.
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From the evidence provided earlier, it can be seen that in fact, religion and science are not two opposing powers offering different explanations for the same events, but merely two entities asking entirely different questions(The Godless Paladin 2009). Science seeks to answer objective ‘how’ questions, and uses public, repeatable data in order to explain exactly how we came to be. Instead, religion asks personal ‘why’ questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives and about our ultimate origin and destiny. It explores the existence of beauty and the experiences of our soul, including the emotions humankind feels(Barbour 1990). Therefore, it can be seen that a contextual interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story, which seeks to uncover the religious truth contained within, is compatible with modern scientific theory, as it asks a different question to the one science