Sacred Ritual This Chapter example essay topic

PART II: Universal Forms of Religious Experience and Expression Chapter 3: The Sacred and the Holy Chapter 3 discusses the sacred or holy as the root of religious experience and practice. This chapter explored the nature of sacred power and the ambiguity of the sacred as taboo, that is, as the source of wonder and purity as well as of fear and danger. It also touches on the psychological or personal experience uniquely associated with the encounter with the holy, and how the sacred, or holy, is manifested in special places and times. Lastly, is explores a family resemblance between religion as the response to what is perceived as sacred and religion as commitment to what is held to be of ultimate meaning and value or as the source of ultimate transformation.

Key themes in this chapter include a discussion of sacred space. It states that sacred space is an opening to the holy or divine, a place where communication with sacred power is made possible. Chapter 4: Sacred Symbol, Myth, and Doctrine The previous chapter discussed what is considered sacred in religion. This chapter discusses how we convey these sacred things. Human beings either do not have direct access to the sacred or we cannot describe or communicate our experience of the scared directly.

We use human language, images, and gestures, that is, symbolic means of communicating our experience. The chapter begins with a discussion of our uniquely human capacity for symbolic expression and then proceeds to explain different kinds of symbolic communication. This is followed by a number of illustrations of the ways in which religious symbols can bridge or bring together the profane and the sacred. The chapter then explores several forms of symbolic communication such as metaphor, parable, and story. This is followed by a discussion of religious myth and its characteristics, and why it is considered and indispensable form of human expression. The chapter concludes with a discussion on religious doctrine.

The purpose of doctrines is to achieve conceptual clarity, coherence, and comprehensiveness. Chapter 5: Sacred Ritual This chapter continues to explore forms of human expression of the sacred. The chapter begins with a definition of religious ritual and then gives reasons why ritual has played such an essential role in religious life. The chapter then turns to an analysis of the two classic types of sacred rituals. The first type are those rites that are connected to the human life cycle such as birth, marriage, and death. These rituals often reflect a distinctive structure that is analyzed and illustrated in rites associated with birth, puberty and initiation into a religious vocation.

The second classical type is associated with fixed points in the yearly calendar and is connected either with the changing of the seasons or with the commemoration and rehearsal of a momentous historical event, for example, Ramadan. The odd feature of many scared rights is the offering of a sacrifice. Over the years, sacrifice has been an extremely important part of religions role in maintaining peace within a religious community. Chapter 6: Sacred Scripture As the title clearly shows, this chapter is about sacred scripture. An important feature of the great religions of the world is the fact that they all possess sacred texts, and that these are set apart from other religious literature as especially normative for worship, teaching and doctrine, and as a guide for daily life.

The chapter points out that scriptures can differ in many different ways. Some scriptures are relatively short and rather uniform in their literary style and genre. Other scriptures are enormous, consisting of essentially a library of volumes and including a rich diversity of literary types. Some religions have very strict boundaries as to which texts are included in their scriptures while others boundaries have remained open and fluid over the centuries. Despite their differences, scriptures all share one common theme; all sacred scriptures are regarded by their particular communities as possessing sacred power and as having a transforming effect upon the devout reader or hearer. Chapter 7: Society and the Sacred: Social Formations of religion The focus of this chapter is the analysis of a variety of types of religious societies and the social and religious dynamics of their development, change, and dissolution.

One basic type of religious society is the natural community, that is, one based on kinship ties, race, nationality, or geography. A second type is the voluntary religious group whose membership is based on common beliefs, special functions, or sacred powers that extend beyond the natural ties of kinship or geography. These include secret societies that often maintain close affiliation with the kinship group while, at the same time, remaining anonymous. Another type of voluntary group is the "founded religion". A charismatic leader or prophet who brings a new revelation or spiritual message and whose authority commands disciples establishes it.

The "founded" religious community faces unique problems on the death of its founder, and the means that the religion survives and expands are also explained in this chapter. Succession is also discussed within the religious community. Sometimes, groups of people in a religious community feel that others are not practicing their faith with enough dedication so they form a "religion within a religion". This the most popular type of religious protest.

This chapter concludes by briefly touching on some of the characteristics of groups known as cults. Part : Dimensions of a New Religious World View: Classic Forms of Belief and Practice Chapter 8: Deity: Concepts of the Divine and Ultimate Reality This chapter describes a variety of ways in which deity or sacred power and value have been experienced and conceived in the history of religion. Many religions reflect a curious mix of animistic, pantheistic, and theistic beliefs and tendencies. Neither must the scheme be thought to represent an evolutionary or progressive development from primal mana to the sophisticated philosophical conceptions of monism or monotheism. When the human imagination begins to reflect on deity, tensions and paradoxes arise between the immanence and the transcendence of the sacred, or between the rich plurality of sacred power and the quest for primordial sacred unity or oneness.

In primal societies, people were not as prone as we are to draw sharp distinctions between the natural and the supernatural. Any object or event the elicits unique feelings of awe and aversion possesses sacred power. It is set apart as having special import, although it is present in such a seemingly earthly object such as a bear's skull, sacred power is always particular, immediate, tangible, even though it may be effable. Chapter 9: Cosmogony: Images of the Natural and Social Order The chapter explores the question, "How did our world and its natural and social order come into being?" A cosmogony is an account of the emergence or creation of the world order. Interest in beginnings is not the result of idle speculation it is intimately tied to the basic concerns about the natural and social order, the status of the gods and humankind, and human action. This chapter states that the most common mistake made by early societies in trying to justify religious cosmogony was their use of scientific methods to do so.

The chapter then goes on to explain the differences between the Greek and ancient Hebrew accounts are discussed, including the very different implications of each conception for such important matters as the nature of God and the problem of evil. The chapter concludes with an examination of cosmogony in a scientific age and with a critical analysis of the effort, by Creation Science, to claim a scientific basis for particular religious cosmogony. Chapter 10: Anthropology: The Human Problem This chapter explores the ways in which religious traditions understand to root of the human problem. While many seriously disagree on the cause of human ignorance, distress, and strife, most human beings agree that life is not what is should be. We are often overwhelmed by a sense of our own weakness and inadequacy, by feeling of hostility and estrangement, or by a profound disquiet provoked by moral guilt and failure. The chapter then goes on to explain the root of the human problem as seen from the Buddhist, Christian, Stoic, and Confucianist point of view.

Christianity feels that the root of the human problem lies in our rebellion against and disobedience of God's will. Confucianism feels that the root of the human problem lies in unnatural, corrupt, or alienated social relationships. Stoic believes that the human problem exists lies in ignorance and our inability to acquire knowledge and virtue through reason. Buddhism feels that our illusion about a permanent self is the root of our craving and egoistic desire, and hence of our unease and pain. Chapter 11: Theodicy: Encountering Evil The word theodicy comes from the Greek words the os and dike; meaning God and justice respectively. This word means, "justifying the ways of God" in the face of the chaos and evil in the world.

Theodicies derive from the fact that evil and chaos must not only be endured but also explained if a sense of meaningless and despair is to be held at bay. The world's religions propose a variety of explanations for the fact of evil, many of which have proven enormously compelling and have endured in very different times and places. The first type of theodicy discussed in one in which persons lose all sense of individuality through complete identification with the larger community or through absorption in some large cosmic reality. A very common type of theodicy is one in which compensation for present suffering is perceived as coming imminently in the future here on earth. Perhaps the most common type of theodicy is that which looks to the reversal of present sufferings and evil in a future life beyond this earth in Heaven or Paradise.

The chapter also speaks about the theodicy of India using Karma and Samsara. The focus of this chapter is answering the question, "If God, who created the world, is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good, why do we live in a world with evil?" Chapter 12: Ethics: Patterns of Moral Action A distinctive feature of all religious communities is the shaping and transmission of a moral tradition. This includes a complex of obligatory moral rules and taboos, time honored moral virtues, and social values that often are transmitted through sacred narratives and texts, and codified in ethical or legal traditions and in ritualistic behavior. In many religions, there is no sharp demarcation between ritual, legal, and ethical requirements. The religious person's sense of obligation and right action is shaped by and conforms to a normative sacred authority. Conformity may be largely personal and demand an essential interior or disposition al response.

This chapter examines some important aspects of religious ethics from a comparative perspective. It begins by suggesting some differences between and ethics of virtue and an ethics of duty. Attention is then given to the distinctive sources of religious ethics and how, from these sources, the religious traditions develop principles, norms, and models of moral life. Charismatic leadership is one of these sources for moral authority that has served as a powerful energizer of moral action within the religious traditions. The chapter goes on to discuss other sources and finally concludes with an examination of how religious community's understanding of its moral obligations affects it's attitude toward the world and society and whether its moral response basically is world accepting, world denying, or world transforming.

A variety of examples are used to throw light on each moral response. Chapter 13: Soteriology: Ways of Salvation and Liberation The way or means of achieving liberation or salvation have varied greatly in the history of religion and range from coercive magic, used to foil an enemy or to ensure a harvest; to acts of passionate entreaty and ecstatic devotion; to highly disciplined ethical patterns of behavior; to pure mystical flights of union with the divine. There are three or four discern able paths or ways that can be observed in all the historical religions and are recognized as the classical types. These are the way of faith, the way of devotion, the way of disciplined action, and the way of meditation and insight. While these patterns can be distinguished, they obviously are often combined.

For example, the devout Muslim may reveal a highly patterned life of ethical and devotional behavior, but the Muslim discipline also reflects a life of radical faith and trust in Allah's providential care and goodness. Certain religions do appear to favor or to reflect one way of salvation as more characteristic of its normative life. Protestantism is characterized by the ways of faith and devotion. Both Orthodox Judaism and Islam reflect a very practical religious life, one that is punctuated by the daily patterns of religious acts.

Theravada Buddhism, on the other hand, is normatively meditative and reflects the way of knowledge and insight. Chapter 14: Eschatology: Goals of Liberation and Salvation This chapter begins with an analysis of salvation with entirely this-worldly conceptions. A second form of salvation look beyond personal psychic wholeness to a future but this-worldly liberation of the entire social order through a coming of a Utopian or Messianic Age. Another concept of salvation is found in those religions that look to salvation in a future other-worldly afterlife, conceived either as a rather insubstantial shade of the physical self, and a disembodied immortal soul, or as one or another for of the resurrected body. Also discussed is the significant change that takes place in the medieval Christian view of salvation, involving the immediate translation of the individual to Heaven or to Hell at the time of death. The last mode of salvation is that associated with various types of monism, for example, in Hindu Vedanta and in certain interpretations of Buddhist Nirvana.

In both instances, meditation and concentration are seen as leading to the release or to the absorption of the self in union with Brahman or Nirvana..