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What is Religion? Scholars have argued a great deal about how to define religion. Sometimes they include references to a God or gods, sometimes not. Some scholars emphasize belief systems, others prefer to focus on rituals, ethics, or other aspects. Here are two examples of one of the most common type of definition, that which emphasizes relation to the 'transcendent' or the 'sacred': Religion is: 'an understanding of the universe, together with an appropriate way of living in it, which involves reference beyond the natural world to God, to gods, or to a transcendental order or process' (John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths, London: Collins, 1977, p. 133). Even more succinctly, but with less emphasis on the 'beyond', Emile Durkheim described religion as 'a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things' (The Elementry Forms of the Religious Life, New York: Free Press, 1965, p. 62). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some scholars tried to explain religion solely in terms of some other factor. Karl Marx thought that religion was merely a mechanism for coping with socio-economic alienation; Sigmund Freud considered religion as the social equivalent of an individual's neurosis; Durkheim thought that religious belief was nothing more than the voice of society. These theories are called reductionist because they reduce religion to something else (yet notice how different they are from each other). As theories, they are both interesting and valuable and continue to be useful in interpreting religions, yet they all fail in one way or another to capture the wholeness of a religious worldview; for that reason reductionist theories are not much favored by contemporary scholars. Religions have turned out to be more complex and persistent than the reductionists thought. More recently, rather than try to reduce religion to some other factor, or define it neatly, some scholars have tried to emphasize the broad nature of religion. One of the best known of these attempts is that proposed by the late Ninian Smart. Smart suggested that we try to approach each religion by looking at it under a number of different dimensions. These are:
Smart's book, The World's Religions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989) is an excellent introduction to this method of understanding religion. In this course, we are dealing with the encounter of Christianity with aspects of the modern world. This means that our primary focus will be on the doctrinal/philosophical and the ethical/legal dimensions, although we will also refer to other dimensions. |