Sentences with phrase «religion as a phenomenon»

That God's love, manifest in diverse ways throughout the duration of the universe, might come to a full and unsurpassable self - expression in an individual human being who lived and died in the Middle East almost two thousand years ago does not seem incongruous with what we now understand about the nature of an evolving universe, especially if we regard religion as a phenomenon emergent from the universe rather than just something done on the earth by cosmically homeless human subjects.

Not exact matches

To mis - ascribe it to religion is to shortchange the individuals of their own accomplishments & abilities, & further perpetuates the notion that such a thing as afterlife, divinity, supernatural & paranormal phenomena exist.

Oh and religions (which are natural phenomena subject to scientific examination) evolve as well.

Joachim Wach, a sociologist of religion, has suggested four characteristics of religious experience and belief: (1) Religion «is a response to what is experienced as ultimate reality; that is, in religious experiences we reach not to any single or finite phenomenon, material or otherwise, but to what we realize as under - girding and conditioning all that constitutes our world of experience.»

America's intermixing of religion and politics, she continued, could only be regarded as a historically neurotic phenomenon, a stubborn holdover from less enlightened times.

I am concerned here to plead that such people should examine the religious approach de novo, and be prepared to give such a widespread human phenomenon as religion their serious attention.

How can we believe at all against the fact that historically our religion has functioned as an opiate for the oppressed and that it is, as a cultural phenomenon, neither appreciably better nor essentially worse than any other religion?

For this reason we can not use the gospel and our theology as defensive weapons in the fight between the religious and the non-religious; rather they are to be used, without prejudice, to discuss with the non-religious the phenomenon and problems of religion and the everlasting love of God.

If you want to use the broad definition of religion then you must use the broad definition of violence as being a global phenomenon, not a singular violent act averted.

Whereas, a historian of religion concentrates primarily on religious symbols completes his / her analysis of religious phenomena as phenomenologist or philosopher of religion.

Dewey's thoroughly secular «common faith» — which he did not hesitate to call a secular religion — could accommodate Christianity, on the condition that the latter drop the claims to truth and authority that identify it with the historical phenomenon known as Christianity.

Modern interpreters of archaic religion as diverse as Lucien Levy - Bruhl and Eric Voegelin have found this phenomenon, though of course they have differed in their theories about it.

That does not mean that major contributions toward an inquiry into the nature of socioreligious phenomena were not made long before, but as an organized systematic discipline (emancipated from the older disciplines in and from which it developed) the sociology of religion is of recent date.

A whole generation was reared on campus unrest in which religious experimentation played a significant role; then the phenomenon of an avowedly «born - again» president, Jimmy Carter, brought a different form of religion onto the national scene; and this was followed by religious resurgence in places as distant culturally and geographically as Tehran and Lynchburg, Virginia.

As with other fields of sociological research the question has been asked if there is good enough reason to treat socioreligious phenomena separately instead of handling them in the traditional disciplines (theology, philosophy, anthropology, etcetera).30 Yet, as against such doubts, the work done by modern scholarship has proved the right to an independent existence of «sociology of religion.&raquAs with other fields of sociological research the question has been asked if there is good enough reason to treat socioreligious phenomena separately instead of handling them in the traditional disciplines (theology, philosophy, anthropology, etcetera).30 Yet, as against such doubts, the work done by modern scholarship has proved the right to an independent existence of «sociology of religion.&raquas against such doubts, the work done by modern scholarship has proved the right to an independent existence of «sociology of religion.»

Feuerbach was too good an interpreter of religion to overlook the phenomenon of self - abnegation, which he read as a subtle form of self - love.

Students may still be encouraged to come to their judgments as to what is the best way to study the phenomenon of religion, the solution of certain historical puzzles, the relation of religion to other aspects of culture, and so forth.

A peculiar phenomenon are the sects connected with Eastern (Oriental) religions, such as the Bahai, Vedanta, Theosophy, and others.

In other words, the ruling classes may wish to employ religious belief and feeling as forces for the retention of their power; but religion being a mass phenomenon that transcends classes, may serve as the justification for and inspiration of vast popular movements that are revolutionary.

Bonhoeffer also accepted the view that religion as historical phenomenon was the fruit of human speculation.

We can be grateful to Keith Ward for so clearly exposing the fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of their arguments - that religion was invented by primitive people to explain natural phenomena such as floods and

Unlike the pagan religions of classical antiquity, e.g. ancient Egypt and the Far East, Christianity does not seek to explain the physical phenomena of the material world as a dramatic struggle between warring gods and goddesses, i.e. μυθος (myth).

And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order.

The importance of religion is shrinking faster and faster as formerly inexplicable phenomena are now considered everyday science.

Objective names such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism have only come into use in recent centuries; this phenomenon, implying that religions are «things», is described as «reification».

It has sometimes been replaced now by the historical study of all religion as a human phenomenon.

It is this aspect of living which allots a very special field to religion and makes it appear as a special and individual phenomenon in human life.

This is driven less by personal religious conviction than by the need to amend the inevitable distortions that resulted from centuries of scholarship that failed to account seriously for a phenomenon as massive as religion.

As students of the phenomenon of religion, we are legitimately interested in the developing sophistication of man's understanding of the divine, but this is not what the Bible itself wants to get across.

The authors allow that rational choice theory is unlikely to explain a phenomenon such as Mother Teresa in «all its fullness,» but they conclude that, «While not sufficient by itself and certainly not the only interpretation the data will bear, rational choice theory provides a valuable addition to the arsenal of analytic approaches to religion.»

The course would have made it clear that religion can and indeed should be studied as a natural phenomenon.

The history of religions» inquiry into the «meaning» of religious phenomena leads one to questions of a philosophical and metaphysical nature, but the history of religions as such can not deal with those questions philosophically.

Here we have a phenomenon not without parallel in the history of other religions, as Lohmeyer notes — for example in Islam and in Mormonism — namely a shift from a first center to a second within the first generation of believers; and it is all the more striking that the evidence is preserved in Acts, whose whole interest and orientation centers in Jerusalem, not in Galilee, and whose earliest traditions are almost exclusively those of the capital city.

The most uncomprehending comments from the Post were those of columnist Richard Cohen, who denounced Scalia as a «cheap - shot artist» for his attack on the Post's coverage of reported miracles in Virginia, and claimed Scalia was «abusing» the newspaper to make his point that the «worldly wise» are hostile «to religion and religious phenomena.»

What he opposes most stridently in this book is not religious doubt itself or attempts to understand religion as a human construct or a biological phenomenon, but rather what he sees as a very artificial and incomplete view of human nature and its purpose: the very presumption that religion can be explained away as unnecessary and that such materialistic perspectives could be definitive or anywhere near ultimately satisfactory for beings who are obviously designed to crave so much more than mere birth, death, and extinction.

(«The apostles who proclaim the word may be regarded merely as figures of past history, and the Church as a sociological phenomenon, whose history forms part of the history of religion.

In critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product.

Only in its underdeveloped forms and its stages of decay is religion found to be essentially tied into social communication, i.e., as a «tribal religion» or as, in Whitehead's formulation, a phenomenon of «sociability» (RM 20ff.).

Normative studies, such as theology and philosophy, and descriptive disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and others, are concerned with various aspects of religions and religious phenomena.

It can be misleading to call this civility / civil religion the Protestant etiquette, however, for that allows the impression that the phenomenon might just as well have been the Catholic etiquette or Jewish etiquette but happens in America, because of who got established first, to be Protestant in flavor.

A Dutch historian of religion, C. P. Tiele, also regarded the science of religions as the philosophic part of the investigation of religious phenomena.

Taking creeds and faith - state together, as forming «religions,» and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their «truth,» we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.

Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell, It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the «promise» of the dawn and of the rainbow, the «voice» of the thunder, the «gentleness» of the summer rain, the «sublimity» of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.

First, it distinguishes theology from the attempt to study religion objectively — from the point of view of some philosophy, some branch of science such as psychology or sociology, or simply as a historical phenomenon.

Towards the beginning of this century there was great enthusiasm for the comparative study of religions; it was often conducted by scholars who believed that when they had discovered parallels to early Christian expressions, ideas, institutions or rites in other religions they had shown that the Christian phenomena were derived from these other religions and also that their meaning within Christianity was essentially the same as it was within the other religion or religions.

The line isn't exactly «Call me Ishmael» or «Happy families are all alike», but this first line of what was published in 1937 as a children's book began what has proved to be a literary phenomenon, an alternative religion, an endless invitation to exegesis and a major industry that has led to an immensely successful trilogy of books and films about life in Middle - earth.

Andy == > We'll have to leave out the classification of religion in with such things as CAGW or HPV vaccination advocacy or opposition or other emergent cultural phenomena.