Essay on Religion

To understand the origins of religion and mystical world of human nature is quite important in order to learn to control, direct and develop the main features of human psychics, cognition and reasoning skills. As the modern psychological science has made quite a progress in studying different aspects of human inner world, as it has understood and explained some puzzles of human emotional and spiritual life it is still stuck to give a reasonable and exhaustive explanation to such an important part of the human world as religion and religious beliefs.

In order to give logical and fundamental explanation of this psychic phenomena many scientists referred to the most primitive existing societies in order to see the practices, rituals and the whole concept of primitive religious beliefs and magic originally and to refer to these observations for further research. The studies of Marett and Malinowski who looked on religious beliefs from the emotionalist perspective show that religion and magic as one of its primitive forms originates from the emotional stress of people and their desire to feel this vacuum, to suppress the emotions of fear caused by the violent environment. 

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In order to overcome this emotional crisis primitive people invented special sorts of ritual traditions of mystical nature where the miracle takes a common place and which are separated from the reality by taboos and certain rules in order to establish the margins between reality and magic. They base this sort of theory on t he concept that primitive people were more empiric than rational, and they perceived the surrounding world only by their feels and emotions rather than by certain critical analysis and reason.

But from the other hand other scientists, as Hamilton mentions mark that primitive societies still had the features of rationalism in their practices and could differentiate to a certain level the reality and metaphysics. Marett’s and Malinowski’s ideas are criticized widely, as being single sided. Hamilton marks that the relation between ritual and emotion is quite variable, more over Marett’s theory doesn’t deal with tribal cultures of primitive societies, so his ideas might be real limited to a certain observed primitive societies. On the other hand Malinowski explored tribal societies so his observations and conclusions might be more persuasive.

If Marett gave the leading role in the development of religious beliefs to the ritual and so in rituals the main source of development of religion, art, and philosophy, then Malinowski on the other hand emphasized on the priority of practical role of magic and myths in archaic societies which had a regulative role in order to keep an order in the tribe and they were later substituted by a more organized and defined system of values and beliefs as religion. In order to choose the definite and well proved position in answering the question about the nature of religion is it more of emotional or intellectual origin it’s important to take into consideration different aspects of this problem. In different cultures now it’s perceived on different levels both on emotional and rational, but still I have to say that the priority of emotional experience is more vivid and obvious as it bases on emotional and psychic experiences rather than on cognition and rationalism. In western culture religion is a supplement to the whole system of the beliefs that people have and is an integral form of culture, and people treat it as culture.

In eastern cultures it’s visa versa, even in Christians of orthodox Europe, not talking about Mulsims and reprentatives of other religion confessions refer to religion as to the tradition form of magic, and consider God to be more a wizard than a God is it’s stated in religion teachings. So we can see that the emotional origin of religion dominates over the intellectual or rational one, and western culture had the same emotional origins of religion as any other society. The religion was a product of person’s fantasies, images and in general, a product of person’s imagination rather than a product of logical and analytical thinking about the world that surrounds a man.

But in many aspects, as modern science shows, emotional and rational approach to reality was close enough on the rise of the human era so it’s difficult to differentiate them. As human emotional world in inalienable components of persons inner world which includes thinking and reasoning abilities, so in many ways it dominated and influenced human’s rational nature as well.

Because people are not able to explain different events that take place in their lives, because they are unable to change the matter of events very often, there appears a basic psychological need to cure their emotional world by referring to some sort of illusion and myth that would substitute reality and would put an end to emotional hunger.

From another perspective religious norms regulate or deeds, life but mostly they regulate the activity of or emotional world and psychics, suppressing negative emotions and regulating our desires according to the situation. Freud, famous German psychiatrist and psychologist developed his own theory about religion and religious beliefs of people, according to which religious was a sort of illusion created by people in order to suppress definite sort of neurotics in human nature, caused by helplessness in the face of the uncontrolled world: [Religion] must exorcise the terrors of nature, [Religion] must reconcile men to the cruelty of fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and [Religion] must compensate them for the sufferings which a civilized life in common has imposed on them`. Freud argued that invention of religion was pretty much similar to the care of adults over children, so the adults had to invent a “heavenly father” who “would take care of them”.

Besides it, he continued to argue and promote this psychological views on the themes of religion as well, as it was a regulator of relations, introduced in order to suppress one’s ambitions, sexual desires and instincts substituting them by the promise to get “all goods” after death. Besides Freud has developed his concept of totemism, or a concept that laid in the origins of all the religions. Totem, or a special symbol that represented the status of chosen or sacred, according to Freud is often transformed into a certain ritual or practice which appears to have religious and mysterious features and qualities which are not practiced on regular bases but have taken place in the past.

Freud states that totemism laid into practice of many religions later, Christianity for example. Being well explained and having a good basement Freud’s theory still has a lot of weak points as it doesn’t include the understanding of a person as a social creature, it doesn’t take into consideration the rational side of religion and of spiritual human world and besides many of his concepts have no application in various religious practices that expand over the understanding of the Christian religion.

On the other hand Freud’s student and later his opponent, Jung argues, that human is motivated not just by instincts and sexual desires as Freud proposed, but is as well motivated by something unexplained and mysterious common features which he called collective unconscious which are similar to all people, no matter where they live, what heritage they are, etc. This “collective unconscious” made them to create a God and religion as a system of beliefs. In comparison to previous authors, Spiro comes with a new theory of religion’s origins stating that person believes simply because he has to, explaining it on the examples of children who imitate the behavior of adults.

Spiro sees religion not only the regulator of relations but a power that helps a person to satisfy his emotional, cognitive and expressive needs. As Spiro states that religion and god are the creation of the human imagination, so we can say that he is close in his ideas to some of philosophical Buddhism concepts. In this trend of Buddhism pagans and gods are mythological creations that are created by human psychics and if to look on Buddhism from this perspective then we would see that it’s nature already takes off all unclearness about this very question.

According to Spiro the human had created god and religion in order to insure that he is protected by the forces of supernatural kind and that they’ll assist him in his everyday life and will help him to be happy and have luck. Buddhism has pretty much similar ideas as it states that the human is in the center of the universe and only human is able to reach the highest level of enlightenment or nirvana, no one else even gods are able to do it, but they have the power and ability to help a man to reach nirvana and pave his way to perfection.

It also includes the idols created by human and the belief in them in order to assist in reaching the perfection and nirvana. Besides Spiro another author, Jung, has some similar traits in his religious theories that are close to the Buddhist concepts. Jung’s idea of collective unconscious explains a lot of religious aspects of Buddhism for example the concept of collective and individual salvation, through keeping to certain norms, moderate way of life, ascetic way of life, etc. In many ways these ideas are quite common to wide social groups and are perceived in the same way. The liberty that Buddhism gives in choosing gods and worshiping them, with the only rule of keeping to the core teaching also explains the “collective unconscious” concept of Jung.

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