FINAL Thoughts

Religion in General - I personally don't fall under any 'religion', nor do I have any plans to. I've been hesitant to accept religion and religious belief because of my initial assumption that religious people are narrow minded, however I've realized that this road block I've put in front of myself has been hypocritically placed there by my own ignorance. After taking a World Religions course in community college I saw the complexity of religions and some of the common threads found throughout them, and I was intrigued. As a psychology major, the importance of one's experience in any given situation is very important and interesting to me, so to take a class in which the nature of religious experience is the topic, is right up my alley. I'm still not a 'religious' person, but I've come to recognize somewhat of a 'spiritual' side to myself. Questioning the presence of a higher power, questioning my inquisitiveness and curiousity about that, my meaning in the world, etc. As these questions come up for me I'm starting to understand that while I may not consider myself religious, many of the questions that arise for religious believers, nevertheless plague me.

Theories of Religion - I was impressed with the many different theories of religion that we encountered throughout the semester. I find it intriguing, and yet confusing, that so many people have the desire and feel the need to explain religion in such concrete terms as if it has to be just that. Tylor and Frazer's theories of religion as an explanation for world phenomena was a good basis for a theory of religion, however, not quite enough. I found Freud's idea of religion as an illusion to be somewhat harsh, and again a bit too concrete. He did acknowledge, however, that religious belief can neither be proved nor disproved, which eliminated some of my distaste for his seemingly judgmental claim on religion itself. I was really interested in his parallel of a father/son relationship being analogous for a relationship between adult and God later in life. While I may not necessarily agree with this idea, it's quite a theory in it's own right and does deserve some attention. Moving on to Marx, I can understand his desire to see change in society, however I didn't quite understand his theory of religion as alienation and a way for the working class to be held down. I would like to ask Marx, how then he would explain the upper class interest in religion if he saw it strictly as a means to keep the working class numb to their harsh living conditions? My favorite theory or religion in Pals, however, was Evans-Pritchard. He seemed to be the most invested in representing religion and religious belief in an accurate way with his anthropological take on it. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, who developed theories based on assumptions, Evans-Pritchard delved into the question of religion with a hands-on approach and I appreciated that. I like that many of the theories of religion came from people in different fields (Freud and psychology, Durkheim and sociology, Marx and economics, and Evans-Pritchard and anthropology), but the conclusion I come to in the end is that no one theory is or can be the all consuming theory or religion. It's important to draw from each theorists' take on religion, just as it is important to draw from each person's experiences with religion, in order to get a more accurate view of just what religion is or can be.

"Losing" One's Faith - In class the other day we were asked to contemplate whether or not someone who loses their faith has in turn contradicted themselves. The question in itself is a complex one, leading to even more complex answers to it. I heard a couple people in class saying that someone who 'loses' their faith may not have been much of a 'believer' to begin with, but I think that is a subjective view on the question. In order to answer this question, we must first ask: What is faith? What caused this person to 'lose' their faith? How does one define contradiciton? There are so many questions to ask within this question that it seems silly and even impossible to come to one specific answer. I watched a movie the other day called "21 Grams" in which an ex-convict finds salvation in God and becomes almost obsessed with religion. One day he hits and kills a man and his two daughters while drunk and begins to question his relationship with God. Is this initial questioning of God a contradiction of his faith? However, when in prison, he tells his friend that it was God's plan for him to be where he was and he seemed to accept it, however conflicted he may have been. I began to think that maybe those people in class were right to say that one who loses their faith isn't much of a believer to begin with. But then later in the movie there is a scene where he is mutilating his religious tattoos implying that maybe he has lost his faith in God and in turn lost faith in himself. I started contemplating the question of losing one's faith again after watching this movie and decided that no matter how religious or faithful one may be to God, it may just be that deep devotion that ruins their faith in the first place. It is possible for one to 'lose' their faith in the event that caused them to do so had such an impact on the individual, as in the case of the movie. I don't believe that this is a direct contradiction of one's faith and that their faith should be called in to question because of it, but this does play into the idea about the devotion one has to God potentially being their downfall.

My Theory of Religion - I previously said that I think it is important to combine all theories of religion, or to at least look at them as a whole rather than as individual theories. Religion is not as concrete as these theorists make it seem. Religion is a fluid and everchanging idea within an individual, and I believe that this is the true essence of religion and religious belief. I think that religion should be defined on an individual basis, just as a religious experience should be a religious experience if one so chooses or feels that that's what it is. Religion should be a personal endeavor and rooted in one's own beliefs and not the beliefs placed on them by what their religion preaches. This is not to say that religion can't be experienced in a social context like Durkheim believes, but it is important for an individual to feel that their choices are truly their own. I'm not a religious person in the common sense of the word, but I would like to think that if I am feeling 'religious' one day or if I have an experience that I feel is religious, that I won't be restricted by other people's ideas of what religion should or shouldn't be.