GENERAL

What is Religion?

A belief system functioning within specific contexts
    of rules and ceremonies.
Usually started by a male founder(s) who advocated following a certain set of teachings, often proposing peaceful behavior of individuals toward one another.
All religions provide answers to the reason for human existence (life) and meaning for the unavoidable experience of the end to that existence (death).
As part of their rules all religions have moral precepts, i.e., ways to assure punishment for those perceived as mistreaters of their fellow human beings and reward, or a better place in the next life, for individuals who follow appropriate guidelines.
By now, most of the major religions are guided both by belief, say in one God, and tradition, say in a certain approach to the founder's teaching which is defended by a vast set of priests operating in bureaucracies.

BELIEF SYSTEMS

What are some specifics about several major religions?

   In the West increased diversity since the Protestant
   Reformation of the sixteenth century:
   - Lutherans
   - Anabaptists
   - Anglicans
   - Calvinists
   - and many more were added to the Roman Catholic Church
   - and Eastern Orthodox Churches, like the Russian, Greek   and Syrian.
  And in other parts of the world other religions that we took up in the first half of WC.

   But one uniformity with all of them (even if at first Protestants, too, wanted to get away from this supposedly restricting RCC phenomenon):
    - a hierarchy;
    - usually with the faithful at the bottom, then the
      brothers and sisters of the religious orders, then
      the deacons, etc. in the various Protestant groups,
      then the ministers and priests, then the
      bishops and metropolitans,
      cardinals and patriarchs, and
      the pope for the RCC;
   -  the faithful are usually talked to, or talked at;
   -  women are excluded, except from the lowest ranks
      of these hierarchies.

    The faithful are encouraged in each institutional
    setting to get close to God, but the setting discourages
    such closeness:
    - institutions tend not to be responsive to needs of
      individuals;
    - institutions tend to have their own needs and
      priorities which superimpose themselves on those
      of the faithful.
    - Institutions design beliefs to suit their needs
      and not the individual nor the "truths" of their
      faith;
    - yet institutions help individuals fulfill their
      various goals in life:
    - by providing examples according to which the
      individual faithful can arrange his/her life,
    - by designing customs and traditions which encourage
      certain approved behaviors, and
    - by setting appropriate ceremonies and regulations.

   Because of the institutionalization of early
   Christianity, we are still stuck with certain ways
   of believing and doing that may not be in the
   best interests of Christian believers.
   Some examples:
   -  The resurrection of Christ: Gnostics, early
      Christians whose records were repressed by the Roman
      Christians, did not believe that it was a resurrection
      in fact, that it was simply a reappearance in the
      minds of persons close to Christ.
   -  Because the early Roman Christian hierarchy needed the
      approbation of its first leaders having been with the
      resurrected Christ, by about 180AD that certain kinds
      of persons were perceived to have been with Christ.
   -  Thus, Mary Magdalene, in spite of her closeness
      to Jesus, was not included among the apostles simply
      because the hierarchy had increasingly become male.
      The last point indicates in part why women were ex-
      cluded from high positions in the Christian churches.
      Men had won the battle over the control of churches.

OTHER MAJOR POINTS

   -  Humans discovered Gods when they recognized themselves
      as different from nature and other species.
   -  Human beings made a further jump when they accepted
      one war god as Lord and God.
   -  Fifteenth-century learning allowed investigations of
      the Old and New Testaments which has not ceased yet:
      e.g., we now know also of the Gnostic Gospels.
   -  Protestantism allowed for a questioning of religious
      authority which has not stopped; thus we are quite
      willing to say, in certain Protestant groups, that
      other Christians, like Roman Catholics, are not quite
      Christians.
   -  Since the eighteenth century, science and technology
      have added a new dimension to religion.
      -- At first scientists, including such men as Isaac
         Newton, who investigated natural phenomena, tried
         to explain nature as a way of getting closer
         to God.
      -- By the late eighteenth century, technology was
         introduced, that is, scientific activity for
         practical purposes.
      -- The latter, but also the radicalization of science,
         drew inventors, or discoverers, away from
         explaining nature to controlling nature.
      -- Knowing nature, as we know from classroom science
         experiments, is controlling nature.
      -- Explaining nature also can mean the opening of a
         door to the unkown, even the loss of control.
      -- Explaining nature in some ways also means
         explaining God, and the end of God as an
         independent phenomenon but as a belief
         in ourselves.

    Explaining God is quite obviously not the same as
    believing in God.
    - We cannot know God, except through our own frail
      mental efforts.
    - But we can explain God's historical emergence in the
      species' mind, that is, we can realize God's existence
      only through belief or through the emergence of the
      phenomenon in our heads.
    - Whatever we believe Jesus to have been, even his own
      explanation of being the son of God is not fully
      satisfying because he had to use contemporary images
      to convey meanings.
    - But however we look at the issue, just by trying
      to explain in a rational fashion, we move beyond being
      part of nature to explaining nature and thus
      breaking the bond with it.