Brance, Lauren & Haddie

For those of you who don’t know and are interested, I am taking two college classes this semester to maintain my teaching certification – a Survey of World Religions and Western Civ. to 1715.  I was excited to be able to take two classes of interest, especially one covering world religions.  Over the course of the semester I will be required to write short responses to each of the various chapters in the book.  I thought it might be fun to share those with our readers!  I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments too.  I’m sorry that you won’t have access to the text when reading my response, but I will give you the title(s) of the chapter(s) I’m responding to.  For this week I’m responding to both chapter 1 and 2,  ”Why is There Religion” and “Oral Religions” combined.

What I find most intriguing after reading chapters 1 and 2, are the stunning parallels and similarities that can be drawn between the various world religions.  I found these similarities especially striking while reading about the indigenous religions in chapter 2. Amazingly, or miraculously (depending on you beliefs about the origins of religion), these indigenous peoples “found in every climate” and “developed in isolation from each other” realize and incorporate many of the same religious truths and practices, so similar that the author of the text refers to them collectively as “sacred paths.”  These oral religions that “sprung from tribal and small-scale cultures” all over planet earth believe in a supernatural realm, share similar beliefs about nature, time, and space and hold in high regard their ancestors and origins.  And though there were and are variances among these religions, it is obvious that there is something at work more than coincidence or chance that would result in these astonishingly similar religions establishing in isolation from one another,  something that would suggest that religion is part of the human DNA, so to speak.

The author began this discussion in chapter 1 by offering an explanation for the phenomenon of religion and religious parallels (ones clearly seen amongst the indigenous religions that developed in isolation studied in chapter 2 ).  His explanation is one of origins. That,  religion finds its origin in man’s effort to answer difficult questions about life and the universe we find ourselves in, ultimately to cope.  The only problem with this explanation is that it is a presupposition that removes the possibility of ultimate truth being found in any religion, by inferring that rather than being created for religion or ultimate truth, man is the creator of religion and his own truth – that the desire for religion is biological or physiological, at best.  If this is the case then religion becomes nothing more than a pathetically weak misinformed attempt to make sense of the world through a bunch of fairy stories.  One might assert that there is some historical and anthropological value in religion, there is some beauty and intrigue, there are some “truths” to be discovered about nature and our relationship with it (which I would argue is debatable, because now we are swimming in the murky waters of relativism).  This might all be true, but if religions find their origin in man and man’s attempt “to deal with our mortality”, then it would seem our deepest questions continue to go unanswered and truth is up for grabs.  The only alternative is to believe that man was created for religion and the phenomenon observed is evidence of that.