| | 1 | Author: | Lang, Andrew | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Making of Religion  | | | | Published: | 2001 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | The modern Science of the History of Religion has attained conclusions
which already possess an air of being firmly established. These
conclusions may be briefly stated thus: Man derived the conception of
'spirit' or 'soul' from his reflections on the phenomena of sleep, dreams,
death, shadow, and from the experiences of trance and hallucination.
Worshipping first the departed souls of his kindred, man later extended
the doctrine of spiritual beings in many directions. Ghosts, or other
spiritual existences fashioned on the same lines, prospered till they
became gods. Finally, as the result of a variety of processes, one of
these gods became supreme, and, at last, was regarded as the one only God.
Meanwhile man retained his belief in the existence of his own soul,
surviving after the death of the body, and so reached the conception of
immortality. Thus the ideas of God and of the soul are the result of early
fallacious reasonings about misunderstood experiences. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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