Religion People

Rudolph Otto

"Religion is that which grown out of, and gives expression to, experience of the holy in its various aspects." The "holy" is "a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion. Religion is rooted in a distinctive feeling or emotional intuition that he describes as the "numinous," meaning spirit or divinity.

Thomas King

"The truth about stories is that's all we are" Wrote The Truth About Stories, Skywoman vs Bible. "Do the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is, or did we simply start off with the wrong story?" "If we believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular."

Karl Marx

- "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature... a protest against real suffering... it is the opium of the people... the illusory sun which revolves around man for as long as he does not evolve around himself." - Claims that religion alienates us from ourselves, each other and reality. -Product of economic factors. Religion is an illusion, the opiate of the people that provide an ideological legitimization of the "economic (and thus social) status quo". -Religion legitimizes the power of the elite and provides comfort and escapism for the poor. Religions imprisons us and distracts us.

Robert Segal

According to him, what unites the study of myth are the questions asked. Three main questions: Origin, Function, Subject Matter.

Joseph Campbell

Campbell's purpose is to show the underlying structure of the hero myth and to help us understand why humans keep telling versions of it over and over again, in culture after culture. He believes that the hero myth is actually written about every human being and that, by studying these stories, we can learn about the stages of our own struggles to become the heroes of our own lives. "The monomyth"

Ronald Grimes

Defining ritual. "Ritual is like Jazz" (There are no specific rules, people depending on each other, its a feeling.) Defining ritual is extremely different than experiencing it. Ritual is not an "object," whether natural, unnatural, or supernatural. Sure, the use of a noun for any event makes it tempting to speak of it as if it were an object, but in this respect ritual is no different from a soccer game. Just because the concepts are constructions does not mean that the events don't exist or that we can't define the words we use to refer to them. The question "What is ritual?," then, is probably more effectively posed as "In such-and-such a circumstance how shall we use the term 'ritual'?" Minimal definition of religion.

Fredrich Schleiermacher

Father of Theological Liberalism; known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity. "Religions" essence is neither thinking nor acting". Religion essense is intuition and feeling. To have no religion means intuit the universe.

Sigmund Freud

Functionalist "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." Psychologist. Religion comes from the brain and psychology. Claims religion is a universal obsessional neurosis. The unconscious minds need for wish fulfillment.

Johnathan Z. Smith

Uses themes and definitions to navigate information, instead of having it already mapped out. Definitions are representations.

Pamela Klassen

Wrote the Story of Radio Mind. "Stories are schemes for ordering a world, offering a cosmology with characters and landmarks to help people find their way" "A story— spiritual or otherwise— gains authority and credibility based on who tells it, who listens to it, where it is told, and what medium its teller uses"

E.B. Taylor

believed religion was rooted in spirit worship "Religion refers to belief in spiritual beings". Principle of psychic unity: All human beings have the same mental capacity. Means that all humans posses same capacity to reason. Cultures are different because they are situated at different levels of intellectual evolution. Religion can be overcome.

Emile Durkheim

considered the father of sociology and a major proponent of functionalism Religion is the self validation of a society by means of myth and ritual" "Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."

Tomas Tweed

created 5 ways of understanding theory

William James

founder of functionalism; studied how humans use perception to function in our environment "Religion is the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." The center of religion is personal religious experience: the feeling of a direct encounter with the "More". Rituals and beliefs are secondary to experience.

Clifford Geertz

interpretive anthropology Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive, and long lasting moods and motivations. By formulating conceptions of general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Culture is a "Pattern of meanings" carried in symbols by which people pass on knowledge. Religion is a cultural system. All knowledge as local knowledge.