Religions

Religion is complicated. It is both very personal and inescapably communal. Religious beliefs and practices are very diverse and exceedingly complicated, but are rooted in and give meaning to universal human experiences. Any generalizations we make about religions are likely to fall apart when applied to the great diversity of religious practice, experience, and belief, and yet careful generalizations still allow us to understand how communities of people form, maintain, and change their religious beliefs and practices. If you want confirmation that your own personal religious beliefs are correct, then this kind of study will frustrate you. Whatever your beliefs, whether you are confident that God exists in exactly the way you imagine, or if you are sure that all notions of the divine are the product of deluded minds, you will find little help here. But, If you are open to the possibility that by engaging with the beliefs and practices of other people we might learn to sympathetically understand them, then you, dearest reader, might find this essay meaningful.

Considering religion critically, and taking seriously the beliefs and practices of others compels us to think carefully about our own beliefs and behaviors and to consider the possibility that, however sincerely we hold our own beliefs, we might be wrong. Or, at the very least, we might have something to learn from members of other religious traditions.In the experience of religion, doubt and faith, belief and unbelief, hope and despair are in constant dialogue with one another. Faith and hope are what we have when we hold an idea to be true, and act on it as if it were true. Doubt doesn’t change that. To quote the writer and theologian Frederick Buechner, “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”* In the quest for insight and understanding, and perhaps even for faith, doubt is a necessity, not a hindrance. If, then, you want to understand the beliefs, behaviors, and motivations of the world’s diverse people, and if you want to understand how religion has influenced the human experience across vast reaches of time and space, you might find this brief introduction kind of interesting. There are a lot of ways to answer the basic question, “What is Religion?” None of these ways are perfect; most focus on one aspect of religion or another.

The definition I use is simple enough to cover most of the beliefs, behaviors, and institutions we generally think of as “religious.” It goes like this: Religion is an act of communication. When we are communicating with God, or the gods, or the sacred, we are “doing” religion. And, when we communicate with one another about God, or the gods, whether through hymns, rituals, or simply through conversation, we are also “doing” religion.

This leads us to two more concepts whose meaning is worth thinking about: “God” (or the gods) and “the Sacred.” In English, “God,” used as a proper name, usually, but not always, refers to the god of Abraham and Sarah, the god of Moses and Isaiah, of Jesus and Muhammad and, by extension, the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These three monotheistic religions share the same cultural hearth in the ancient Near East and share similar understandings of divinity. The word “God” is used to translate several words in the languages of ancient scriptures. The Hebrew Bible, uses the Hebrew word, Elohim (אֱלֹהִים), which is technically a plural word meaning “gods" to refer to the singular deity who was encountered by the ancient patriarchs of Israel (Abraham and Sarah, among others), and to Moses, and to the prophets of Israel. In the Book of Exodus, Moses, encounters Elohim in the form of a burning bush in the desert and is told that this god has a name spelled in ancient Hebrew (which had no vowels) יַהְוֶה‎. (Some time in the middle ages, the four base consonants, written in English as YHWH, were joined with the dots and lines which serve as vowel markers and suggested a pronunciation of “Yahweh.” This is little better than an educated guess. To observant Jews, the name of God is too sacred to be pronounced. Thus, from early in the history of Judaism, the Hebrew word “Adonai” or “Lord” was substituted for Yahweh when the sacred text was read aloud. In English translations of the Hebrew Scripture, יַהְוֶה is usually translated as “Lord” though some older English translations (such as the version King James I of England authorized and saw published in 1611) print the name of God as Jehovah (writing the Y as a J and the W as a V while adding the approximate vowel sounds of “Adonai.”

When Muhammad received his own revelation in the year CE 610, he applied the Arabic word for God with the definite article, giving us Allah (الله)—The God.

There are, of course, many other deities populating the beliefs, rituals, and traditions of people both ancient and modern. The shared deity of Christians, Muslims and Jews differs from most other deities by being singular, solitary, and unique. In the words of the Hebrew Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One.”

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam make up a family of religious communities sometimes referred to as the “Abrahamic” faiths, since all three trace their origins to the ancient patriarch, Abraham, and his wife Sarah. None of these three religions are monolithic. Each has given birth to multiple reform movements and traditions, local practices and beliefs.

Similarly, Hinduism and Buddhism represent another major family of religions. Hinduism emerged in Ancient India in the beliefs and practices of a people who called themselves the Aryans. Unlike the monotheistic beliefs of the Abrahamic faiths, ancient Hindus did not separate the sacred from the “profane” world in which all living and non-living beings exist. The Supreme Being is both immanent and transcendent, creator of what is real and Reality itself. God, as understood in Hinduism, is not personal though the myriad deities that pervade the universe are indeed personal and can be encountered in ritual, sacrifice, and meditation.

Buddhism is derived from Hinduism. Unlike Hinduism which is older than civilization and predates the written word, Buddhism has a founder, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in India sometime in the Sixth or Fifth Centuries BCE. Siddhartha, according to the stories that were not written down until long after his death, was born into a princely family that had ambitions for him. Siddhartha was brought up in privilege and in a life of ease. The only thing it seemed to lack was a sense of meaning. Through a series of experiences that left him dissatisfied with his charmed life, Siddhartha abandoned his family to become a wandering holy man, seeking enlightenment through meditation and self-denial. It didn’t work. Until, while meditating under a ficus tree in Bihar, India, he understood the problem and the solution. He was unhappy. All beings were unhappy. To have existence was to be unhappy. Why? Because all things that exist have unrequited desires. They want things they cannot have. No matter how much a being might have, it wants more. And then more. And then even more. He further reasoned that the only way to escape this unfortunate circle of unhappiness was to renounce desire itself. The cause of our unhappiness is not that we lack everything our heart desires, it is that our heart desires in the first place. Desire makes us unhappy. Abandon desire and contentment will follow. This is, of course, easier said than done. Buddhism is, essentially, about escaping this unending cycle of unhappiness. There are many varieties of Buddhism, none of which are exclusive of one another. Each focuses on different pathways to enlightenment.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are often considered “World Religions.”

Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are universal religions in that they claim to teach truths that are applicable to all people. Thus, they are also missionary religions, seeking through various means to convert others to their faith and practices.

Judaism and Hinduism, as well as most of the world’s other religions, are ascriptive—an attribute related to nationality. While it is possible to convert to Judaism and Hinduism and other ethnic religions, it is not common and often requires the convert to adopt a new ethnic identity as well as a set of religious practices. There hundreds of ethnic religions. Shinto continues to influence Japanese culture and identity. In India (and in whatever other countries they have found a home) the Sikh (from India) maintain an inseparable ethnic and religious identity.

One might also notice that different ethnic communities practice a “world” religion in specific and exclusive ways.

When we study the religions of the world, we are considering the many things people do as they seek to communicate with one another about God or the gods, or when they seek to communicate with God or the gods. Religion can be reflected in intentionally and obviously religious institutions such as churches, mosques, and shrines, but religion’s influence tends to be far more pervasive than that. Religion influences the way people dress, work, interact with others, and even how they eat. Many religious traditions call for times of feasting and of fasting, for example; some foods are forbidden by some traditions while other foods have important ceremonial functions—bread and wine in Christian communion, the unleavened bread and other foods of the Jewish Passover meal are familiar examples.

One does not have to believe in a religion to be influenced by it. This text is being written in the summer of 2020, a date which reflects an assumption that Jesus was born 2,020 years ago (a belief reflected in the abbreviation A.D. or “anno domini” which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord.” In the last few decades, the AD prefix has been replaced with the suffix CE which stands for the less religious sounding “Common Era.” But the fact remains. Even among the most secular-minded, religion continues to influence our thinking.

The division of time into weeks of seven days has its origins in ancient Mesopotamia, but its centrality in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in the creation narrative in the first chapter of Genesis in which God creates the world in six days and then rests on the seventh, thus establishing a Sabbath Day that continues into the very modern idea of the weekend.The names given to the days of the week (in English), reflect celestial bodies associated with Roman deities (Saturday, Sunday, Monday), and the names of ancient Nordic deities: Tyr, the Norse god of war gives his name to Tuesday, Oden, or Woden, to Wednesday. Thursday is named for Thor and Friday for Firgga, the wife of Odin.

Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and Buddhism make universalizing claims on their adherents. That is, the teachings of Jesus, Muhammad, and of the Buddha are understood to be relevant to everyone. Universalizing religions often have a missionary focus, and encourage new members to adopt the practices and lifestyles of the religious community without giving up or changing their national identity.

Ethnic religions are based within the national and community identity. Shinto, one of the primary religions of Japan, focuses on the veneration of one’s ancestors. It is difficult to imagine anyone becoming a Shinto who was not of Japanese ancestry or birth. Within Christianity, the Eastern Orthodox traditions—Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, as well as Coptic (Egyptian) and Ethiopian Christian traditions are, in practice, a part of the national and cultural identity as well as ones religious belief.

While most religious traditions trace their origins to the ancient past, some are quite recent in origin. Rastafarianism originated among impoverished Jamaicans in the 1930s and has expanded to many parts of the world. Rastafarianism, like several other religions of the Caribbean, also tend to be syncretic, combining concepts and practices from multiple religious traditions and cultures in new ways. Voodoo (or Vodou), was created by West Africans brought to the Caribbean. Voodoo combines West African traditions with those of Roman Catholicism.

Different religious traditions have different places of origin or hearths and they tend to reflect this place or origin. Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia are the hearths of Islam. Christianity and Judaism both look to the lands claimed by the modern states of Israel and Palestine as religious hearths. Hinduism and Buddhism are identified with India although the vast majority of the world’s Buddhists live outside of India.

While many countries identify a predominant religion (and some places identify an official state religion) few places in the modern world are religiously homogenous. India is home to multiple religions, including Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, while there are substantial and influential Muslim and Christian minorities as well.

Inevitably, when people of different religious traditions live in close proximity to one another, cultural borrowing occurs. This is called syncretism. The Christian holy day of Easter celebrates the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The popular addition of bunny rabbits and decorated eggs is a an example of syncretism. As Christian influence spread across Europe in the late Classical Period, pre-Christian celebrations of springtime (which incorporated symbols of fertility like eggs and rabbits) were joined in the popular imagination with the Resurrection and the promise of eternal life.

A few key ideas are helpful as we begin this brief introduction to the geography of religion.

Theology is our attempt to understand God or the gods, usually within a specific religious tradition and most often making use of the intellectual tools of philosophy. Roman Catholic theology differs radically from Hindu theology, but theologians in both traditions seek to use the sacred scriptures and writings of their traditions, human experience, and philosophical reasoning to understand the divine. Theology can take many forms. Even to argue against the existence of God is to make a theological argument. Prayer, praise, and worship are not theological in themselves, but they do reflect the theological understanding of the people praying, praising, and worshiping.

Something is sacred if it is set apart from ordinary use and dedicated to the divine. Some places are made sacred by what happened there in the past. In Jerusalem, the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are held sacred by Christians. The Dome of the Rock, built on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, is sacred to Muslims. The entire city of Jerusalem is sacred to Jews.

Mysticism is a direct human encounter with the divine. Mystics seek divine encounters through meditation, though often in the history of religion, the divine presence is revealed unexpectedly, surprisingly, and in varied ways.

Traditional Religion refers to the indigenous religious traditions of the world that are usually associated with specific ethnic groups, tribes, and communities. Traditional religions often lack written scriptures, but have rituals and stories that are passed down from generation to generation and are part of a traditional community’s identity.

Ethnic religions are identified closely with a single nationality or cultural community. Shinto is associated exclusively with Japanese culture. Sikhs, are a religious community from India.

Religious traditions, like languages, have developed throughout human history and have been affected by globalization like the rest of human culture.

The Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) trace their origins to the story of Abraham and the covenant made between Abraham and God. All three of these religious traditions originated in the Middle East and share a belief in a single, universal deity who demands that he alone is God and he alone should be worshipped. The Abrahamic religions share an understanding that God places ethical demands on those who worship him: to care for the stranger, the poor and the helpless, to speak the truth and to live in harmony with one another.

Hinduism and Buddhism represent another vast set of religious traditions. Both religions originate in the beliefs and rituals of ancient Aryan invaders of India whose sacred writings set out a world view very different from what was developing at the same time in the Middle East. Hinduism, which is practiced almost exclusively by people in India or by members of the Indian diaspora, focuses on the idea of becoming. Every living being bears the imprint of previous existences. There is no universal moral demand, since the proper behavior for a tiger—to kill and eat— is very different from the proper behavior of a monk—to live in peace. The goal of a life well lived is to be reborn in a higher form until, after many lifetimes, one escapes the constantly turning wheel of existence and simply stops existing. There are many, many ways of experiencing and practicing Hinduism, and this generalization is, as with all generalizations, incomplete and not universally true. While there are many Hindu scriptures, the most influential remains the Bhavagad Gita.

According to Buddhist tradition, in the fifth century BCE, Siddhartha Gautama, a young man from a princely Hindu family set out to find enlightenment. He wanted to escape the continually turning wheel of existence, so he turned at first to the existing Hindu traditions of asceticism but found they only left him tired and hungry and no closer to his goal of complete understanding than he was to begin with. Finally, in a moment of clarity, he understood the problem: To exist is to suffer. Suffering is caused by unfulfilled desires. Desires can never be fulfilled, since we are always left wanting more. The only escape from suffering is to renounce desire—to learn to want nothing.

The renunciation of desire is more difficult than it sounds, since even the desire for enlightenment can get in the way of this state of clarity. Now known to his disciples as the Enlightened One or, Buddha, he began to teach his philosophy to anyone who would listen. Over the centuries, Buddhism spread far beyond India, becoming, in its various forms, the dominant religion in much of East Asia.

The distribution of religions in the modern world reflects many centuries of colonial expansion and conquest. Protestant Christianity (in blue on the map) is reflected most strongly in those countries colonized by Great Britain, while Catholicism spread into Central and South America along with the Spanish conquest of Central and South America. Catholic missionaries also accompanied Belgian and French colonization efforts in Africa in the Nineteenth Century and left a Roman Catholic influence there.

Some religions are closely identified with a particular national identity and are not interested in spreading their beliefs and practices beyond the ethnic community. Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism (in Japan), Sikhism, and Jainism (both of which are influential minority religions in India) are essentially national religions. They have little interest in making converts. Often, someone who does convert does so in order to identify with the culture and community, not just the religion.

On the other hand, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have spread widely among many ethnic communities and have come to be identified as world religions. All three religions actively seek to make converts, often by sending missionaries into foreign countries to preach, teach, and present the religion in a positive light. During the era of colonialism, European colonial powers sponsored encouraged missions as a way to expand colonial influence over native people. In sub-Saharan Africa, Christianity expanded at the same time religious commitment began to decline in Europe and North America to the point that African Christianity has begun to exert a greater influence on global Christian thought and practice than Europe, long the heart and hearth of world Christianity. Similarly, although the Arabian Peninsula is the cultural hearth of Islam, far more Muslims live in Africa and Asia than in Arabia, and while the Arabic language is of central importance in Islam, few Muslims outside the Middle East can read or speak it with any fluency.

Religion begins in the mind and the heart, but it has had a quite visible effect on the land. In most European cities and many small town, the skyline is dominated by one or more cathedral towers. In Islamic communities, mosques—ranging from simple rooms to vast and ornate edifices—provide the faithful with a place to gather for daily prayers. Religious traditions make some places sacred—set apart from ordinary life and commerce—in ways that can create conflict. Among some of the Aboriginal people of Australia, Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is a sacred place that should be respected from a distance. Among tourists, it is a challenge, a landscape to be climbed and conquered. To the Australian Government, which has to balance both interests, it is an enduring source of conflict.

More recently, controversy has swirled around the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Built in the Sixth Century by the Emperor Justinian I, it stood for many centuries as the greatest church in Christendom. In 1453, Istanbul fell to the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed the Conquerer who, while tolerating the continued presence of Christians in the city he renamed Istanbul, converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. In 1935, the secular Turkish government under Mustafa Kemal Attaturk turned the great building into a historical museum and monument open to everyone. In 2020, the increasingly religious government of Turkey restored the Hagia Sophia to Muslim control and allowed Friday Prayers to resume there for the first time since 1935.