Secularism and the nature of religion

The Nature of religion

One way to approach the question about religion is to observe the words we use in our talk about the subject. People seem to have an idea about the meaning of 'religion'. Some derive it from historical concepts and others share religious characteristics that are agreed upon as religion. Still others define the idea of religion by contrasting it with what it does not include. In short, we need to consider all the different approaches to religion in order to understand its' nature.

Western Religion

The Euro-American West created the term "religion" with reference to Christianity. During the European Middle Ages, the word religio in Latin and its derivatives in the other languages in Christian Europe had a meaning of piety; or the faith and action resting on a practicing member of the community. 'A religious' continues to mean a member of a religious order.

Early Christians were aware of their rivals and major challengers. They were the Jews and Muslims to the south and east of Europe. In the classical Mediterranean and in pre-Christian northern Europe it was the pagans. The term 'religions' were not used for these other traditions until after the fifteenth century. 

From the 1490s onward, ideas were enlarged through voyages of discovery and trade. With the invention of the printing press numerous books catalogued the ceremonies and customs of Asia and the Western hemisphere. The teachings of China and India were described as models of political and metaphysical wisdom, with an eye to reforming this or that position in Europe. 

When the Christian world of the West viewed other traditions, it sought to define them in terms of its own preferences on what it described. The desire was to pin things down as affirmations of belief. One identified oneself as a Christian by declaring such-and-such about God, Jesus, or the world. So the Christian observer expected the adherent of another tradition to have a corresponding set of beliefs. The Christian self-understanding imposed three of its own predilections on what it described.

Some of Asia’s great traditions, such as Buddhism, present substantial sophisticated, and challenging doctrines, but in the case of Shinto, for instance, statements of doctrine are difficult to find.

The first Christian predilection is  to expect every religion to have a systematic doctrine. It excludes a vast important range of humanity’s religious activity.

A second Christian predilection is to impose on all religion Christianity’s institutional distinction between the sacred and the secular. Christianity started with three centuries of minority status before receiving state patronage. As a consequence they became accustomed to the idea that some things belong to God   and other things to Caesar. One of the chief characteristics of modern times in the Euro-American West is the secular lifestyle that puts both intellectual and institutional limit on the range allocated to religion.

This however, is not helpful for understanding classical Islam. Islam did not have the Christianity developmental stage which took over 300 years of experience as a minority. Islam was launched in Arabia as a total value system for society, including its laws and commerce and warfare.  With Islam virtually any aspect of culture and civilization is relevant to religion.

Chinese thought dates back more than 2,500 years. The principal contribution of Confucius and his early successors was a humane social ethic what we might consider moral philosophy. Confucius made rhetorical references to Heaven but was agnostic about much of traditional religion and ritual in his day.

Confucius is closely parallel to the Greek philosopher Socrates. The tradition stemming from Confucius teachings became religious in the course of later centuries, when Neo-Confucians cultivated an inner personal spirituality and speculated on the ultimate nature of things.

A third Christian expectation concerning ‘religion’ is the notion of exclusive membership. That God should demand loyalty and tolerate no rivals is part of the faith of Judaism and was passed on to Christianity and Islam. Each of these three expectations has tried hard to separate the boundaries of its communities. The notion that if you follow one tradition, you cannot follow another is not always applied across southern and eastern Asia. For example, the early Sikhs were disciples of a teacher who saw God as transcending all forms, including the boundaries of human communities of worshippers. Sikhism was founded during the 15^th century by Guru Nanak and continued to progress through the ten successive Sikh gurus.

Three centuries after the 1490s the classification of religions remained fourfold in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and paganism. Over time , the category of ‘pagan’ expanded as new discovers in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were added to the literary record of the ancient Mediterranean world and folklore of pre-Christian Europe. By the same token, the initial descriptions, which were limited to rituals and ceremonies, expanded to include philosophically sophisticated doctrines which are included in some texts of Asian languages.

The category of ‘pagan’ was stretched to the extreme because of the increase of information about doctrines and other textual sources that precipitated the drawing of a new religious picture. One of the first books written in English devoted a chapter each of a half dozen major traditions that was written in 1846 by a Anglican theological scholar, Frederick Denison Maurice (1805 -72).

In the 1800s, the idea of the ‘great’ or ‘living’ or ‘world’ religions was launched; an idea that has continued to the present. The consensus has centered on a set of traditions that have been historically influential and that are still alive today. These are the three great missionary religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. It has often included the national religious heritages of Israel (Judaism), Iran before Islam (Zoroastrianism), India (Hinduism), and Japan (Shinto). It can also include two distinct communities in India (the Sikhs and the Jains) and two distinct teachings in China (the Confucian and the Taoist).  

There are three kinds of omitted traditions. One type is the religious life of tribal populations. It is fragmented and diverse, and its traditions are oral rather than textual. A second type includes the traditions that, no matter how sophisticated their doctrine or rich their mythology have died out. These include Manichaeism, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, Mexico and Peru. The third type includes recent developments such as new emerging religions in Japan, introduction of Scientology, and the Baha’I faith.

Religion cannot be defined per se because each nation has their individual values and beliefs. They create their own doctrines and belief systems based on ideology and cultural myth.