World Religions
The world “religion” can be defined in many ways but usually it involves one or more of the following three things:
The worship of a God or Gods
Guidelines about how to behave
Answers to life’s biggest questions
Since science also seeks to provide answers to life’s biggest questions, it sometimes comes into conflict with religion. Therefore, some people believe that we must choose between the two. However, other believe that science and religion can both be useful (since science tends to answer the question HOW and religion tends to answer the question WHY)
Early Religions
The earliest kind of religion to develop was animism. It was developed while humans were living as hunter-gatherers and is still found among indigenous people today. Animists believe that humans and animals (and sometimes even plants and rocks) gave a soul or spirit. The word animism, animal, animation all comes from the same root – all are related to the idea of a force that makes something move or “Come alive”. Spirits were assumed to be responsible for things that happened in nature (such as the weather).
Over time, many things in nature became more and more personified until they were eventually thought of as being gods and given specific names. Animism therefore became polytheism (belief in many gods). The first human civilizations followed different types of polytheism – such as the Egyptians along the Nile or the Babylonians along the Euphrates and Tigris.
However, another group of ancient polytheists would become more important in the history of religion – the Indo-Europeans. From their original home near the Caspian Sea, they split into several groups – some setting in Europe and other in Iran and India. The groups in India integrated with the people already living there are played a role in the development of Hinduism. One of the groups that settled in Europe became the ancient Greeks. We can therefore see certain similarities between Greek and Hindu gods.
In ancient polytheism, there was always a sky father and an Earth mother, according to the Indo Europeans the name of the sky father “Dyaus”. This word eventually evolved into “Zeus” (the main god of the ancient Greeks) and can still be seen in words like “Dieu” (The French word for God)
Although Hinduism today still seems like polytheism, it is actually closer to something called pantheism (belief that everything is part of one god). Many other new religions also developed out of early Hinduism, such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. These religions are collectivley known as Indisan or Dharmic religions. We look at Hinduism and Buddhism in more detail on another day.
Religion in the West
Meanwhile, in another part of the world, the ancient Jewish people started following monotheism. The part of the Christian Bible known as the Old Testament tells the story of the Jewish people and their beliefs. Some famous Old Testament characters include Adam, (the first man), Noah, Abraham (the father f the Jewish people), Moses and David. Many English names today are based on Bible characters like these.
At the same time as the Jews were developing their monotheism, many Greek thinkers were moving away from belief in Gods altogether and developing philosophy and science instead, this later payed the way for agnosticism and atheism.
Then, about 2000 years ago, a Jewish teacher named Jesus died and some of his followers claimed that he was raised from the dead. These followers eventually became known as Christians. However, because the culture of that time was dominated by Greek thinking, Christianity (and most of Western thought in general) developed out a combination of Hewish monotheism
| Abrahamic (Western) | Indian (Eastern) |
|
Monotheistic
Focused more on hearing (holy books are therefore very important) |
Non-monotheistic
Focused more on seeing (visual symbolism is therefore very important) |
|
See life as linear (one life) |
See life as cyclical (rebirth) |
