What is RELIGION?
- it is a system of beliefs and practices primarily centered around a transcendent reality, either personal or
impersonal, which provides ultimate meaning and purpose to life.
- It offers us a cosmic map (the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of theuniversefrom a religious
perspective) and shows us our place on the map. Through its sacred books, it enables us to find our way
through.
- It helps to legitimize and entrench (establish so that change is difficult) our social mores, rituals, and values. It
offers comfort in sorrow, hope in death, courage in danger, and spiritual joy in the midst of despair. It also helps
to give us a sense of dignity and self-worth.
Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.’’
Sacred tomes (a book) of the religions of the world—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Koran,
the Dhammapada—are literary classics in their own right.
Auschwitz survivor Olga Lengyel writes that ‘‘priests and nuns in the camp [who] proved that they had real
strength of character.’’
Religious belief sustains people through times of tremendous suffering; it enables them to overcome life-
crippling habits and addictions; and it has motivated some of the most amazing acts of artistic expression,
generosity, courage, and self-sacrifice in all human history.
Religion’s power and influence are no guarantee of truth – It could be that the impact of religion in human affairs
shows only that humans are myth-making and myth-craving animals.
There is a dark side to religion, too—its bigotry, wars, and intolerance—which should give us pause in
evaluating its merits.
Sigmund Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, said that religion is an illusion—a belief that we hold because we
want it to be true, and which can be neither verified nor refuted.
Little children, according to Freud, grow up thinking their parents, often their fathers, are godlike and very
powerful. When they become teens, they realize that their fathers are also mortal and not especially
powerful.
Karl Marx viewed religion as expressing the misplaced longings of alienated people: “Religion is the self-
conscious and self-feeling of the man who either has not yet found himself or else (having found himself) has lost
himself once more. But man is not an abstract being – meaning, humans are not theoretical or conceptual
entities but rather concrete and tangible beings with physical existence.
Religion is the opium of the people.
- it is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
unspiritual conditions.
- He meant that religion serves as a sort of comforting and distracting force for individuals in society.
Opium was used as a painkiller or an escape from reality.
At the heart of the great theistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is the idea that the universe was
created by an all-powerful, benevolent, and providential God.
If God exists, the world is not accidental, but a home that has been designed for rational and sentient
beings (able to perceive and feel), a place of personal purposefulness.
