A major theme among philosophers of religion in the West has been that of God, including questions about the nature and existence of God, challenges to the existence of God, language about God, and so on. ... Wha t we learn from stories is different from what we learn from systematic thought and concepts. Created by. The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written. So this kind of Western assumption of religion can only be applied by force into ancient Eastern religio‑philosophical traditions. Ritual acts focused on sacred spaces and/or objects. He believed that scientific thinking would likely replace religious thinking, with people giving only minimal attention to rituals and ceremonies. The narrow concept of religion, more often pressed by government officials than scholars of religion, needs reconsideration in the contemporary world. Oosthuizen, Professor of Science of Religion, University of Durban-Westville, Natal, South Africa, by M. Darrol Bryant, Department of Religious Studies, Renison College, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Scientology: An Analysis and Comparison of its Religious Systems and Doctrines, The Reliability of Apostate Testimony About New Religious Movements, by Lonnie D. Kliever Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies, The Sea Organization and its Role Within the Church of Scientology, by Frank K. Flinn Ph.D. The concept of the freedom of religion is biblical for several reasons. It would be ridiculous to think that every belief system or ideology is even just religious, never mind a full-fledged religion, but that's the consequence of how some try to use the term. Even if we don’t use a specifically functionalist or essentialist definition here, it remains true that such definitions can offer interesting ways to look at religion, causing us to focus on some aspect which we might have otherwise ignored. Spell. Religion has no … Oxford Dictionaries defines religion as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. Some have argued that religion isn't hard to define and the plethora of conflicting definitions is evidence of how easy it really is. Since the 1960s, scholars in theology, philosophy, history, and thesciences have studied the relationship between The new discipline, called “history of religions” or “comparative religion,” became general and comparative in its approaches. The first marker, for example, is about "supernatural beings" and gives "gods" as an example, but thereafter only gods are mentioned. The Meaning Of Islam: The word ‘Islam’ literally means ‘peace’. Experiences can be occasioned by something external and universally available, such as the starry sky, or by something external and private, such as a burning bush. After a brief conversation, the young man “went away sorrowful,” choosing not to follow Christ. In the later years, the term was used to relate to t… A worldview, ideology, or a general picture of the world as a whole and the place of individuals therein which contains a description of an overall purpose or point of the world and how individuals fit into it. The whole problem of the existence of divine or social “ties” of this kind is very Western, however, and the idea itself in fact is completely absent in many cultures in the world. More of an individual practice and having a … STUDY. PLAY. Experiences can be internal and effable, such as a vision, or internal and ineffable, as is claimed by some mystics. Sociologists study religion to understand religious experiences around the world and how religion is tied to other social institutions. We see this problem most often among those who assume that the strict monotheistic nature of western religions they are most familiar with must somehow be a necessary characteristic of religion generally. Sources of western concepts of the divine have been threefold: experience, revelation, and reason. Narratives convey their own types of meaning and information.