University of Virginia Library

RELIGION:

hundreds of different definitions of religion exist each reflecting either a scholarly or a DOGMATIC bias depending in the last resort on the PRESUPPOSITIONS of the person making the definition. Religion clearly contains intellectual, RITUAL, SOCIAL and ETHICAL elements, bound together by an explicit or implicit BELIEF in the REALITY of an unseen world, whether this belief be expressed in SUPERNATURALISTIC or IDEALISTIC terms. A number of the more common definitions are:

BERGER, Peter -"the human enterprise by which a SACRED cosmos is established."

DURKHEIM Emile -"a unified system of BELIEFS and practices relative to SACRED things."

FRAZER, James -"a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct or control the course of NATURE and human life."

HEGEL, George -"the knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its NATURE as ABSOLUTE mind."

JAMES, William -"the BELIEF that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme GOOD lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto."

KANT, Immanuel -"the recognition of all our duties as divine commands."

MARX, Karl -" the SELF-conscious and SELF-feeling of man who has either not found himself or has already lost himself again... the general theory of the world... its logic in a popular FORM... its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence..."

SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich -"a feeling for the infinite" and "a feeling of ABSOLUTE dependence."

SMART, Ninian -"a set of institutionalized RITUALS with a TRADITION and expressing and/or evoking sacral sentiments directed at a divine or trans-divine focus seen in the context of the human phenomenological environment and at least partially described by MYTHS or by myths and doctrines.

STARK, Rodney -"any socially organized pattern of BELIEFS and practices concerning ultimate meaning that assumes the EXISTENCE of the SUPERNATURAL."

WHITEHEAD, Alfred North -"what the individual does with his own solitariness."

WEBER, Max -"to say what it is, is not possible... the essence of religion is not even our concern, as we make it our task to study the conditions and effects of a particular type of SOCIAL BEHAVIOR."