Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
First of all, men seek out lucidity and experience anxiety when empirical
phenomena don't make sense. The conviction that ''the odd'' can be accounted
for must be sustained. Second, there is the problem of suffering. The question is
HOW to suffer. Religion on one hand anchors the power of our symbolic resources
for formulating analytic ideas in an authoritarian conception of the overall
shape of reality; on the other hand it anchors the power of our resources for
expressing emotions. This helps humans resist the challenge of emotional
meaninglessness from pain. Third, religion helps men deal with evil. Our symbolic
resources provide us with a workable set of ethical criteria and normative guides
to govern our action. It responds to the disquieting sense that one's moral insight
is inadequate to one's moral experience. The problem of evil is in essence the
same sort of problem as bafflement or suffering -- NO ORDER.
The religious response to each case is the formulation, by means of symbols, of an
image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for the
ambiguities of human experience. The effort behind religion is not to deny the
undeniable, but to deny the inexplicable, through symbols.
''And clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that...''
How is it that the denial mentioned above comes to be believed? Religious belief
involves a prior acceptance of authority which transforms that experience. The
religious perspective is ''he who would know must first believe.'' This perspective
differs from the common sense perspective in that it moves beyond the realities
of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining
concern is not action upon those wider realities , but of acceptance and faith in
them. The religious perspective differs from the scientific perspective in that it
questions the realities of every day life in terms of non-hypothetical truths. It
differs from the aesthetic perspective in that it deepens concern with fact and
seeks to create an aura of actuality.
It is in ritual - consecrated behavior - that the conviction that religious directives
are sound is generated. It is in ceremonial form that moods and motivations
which sacred symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of
existence which they formulate -- reinforce one another. Religious acts for
participants are enactment's, materializations of religion -- not only models of
what they believe, but also models for the believing of it. The acceptance of
authority that underlies the religious perspective that the ritual embodies flows
from the enactment of the ritual itself.
''that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic''
Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar positivism would have
it, it describes the social order, but because it shapes it. The movement back and
forth between the religious perspective and the common sense perspective is
actually often ignored by social anthropologists. Religious belief in the midst of
ritual, where it engulfs the total person and as a remembered reflection of that
experience in the midst of everyday life are distinct. Religion alters the whole
landscape presented to common sense, alters it in such a way that the moods