Ústav

              religionistiky

Vernon Reynolds & Ralph Tanner: Why Religion, in: Vernon Reynolds & Ralph Tanner, Social Ecology of
Religion, Oxfrod University Press: Oxford  1995, s. 9 – 13

                                          FRVŠ 1890/2005


Téma:          Náboženství a adaptace: náboženství jako součást adaptačního     procesu




Against expectations, religion has, in the 1990s, become a topic of everyday conversation and
concern. Whether or not the war in the Gulf was about oil or colonialism or something else, it was
dubbed by one of the protagonists a jihad, or holy war. "Is this your civilization?" asked one of
the survivors of the bombing of a Baghdad bunker in which hundreds of civilians were killed, when
confronted by a Western TV journalist. He might as well have asked, "Is this your religion?" Even
though the Islamic nations of the Middle East and elsewhere were divided about the Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank of the River Jordan, there is little doubt
that anti-Christian and anti-Jewish sentiments were revived among the Islamic people of the Middle
East as a result of tile bombing of civilians in Iraq, and old wounds were reopened. In the former
Yugoslavia, too, "ethnic cleansing" has taken place not only on national and linguistic grounds but
also along religious lines, again primarily between Christians and Muslims.

Why religions? Why do religions go on? What makes them persist?

Cannot modern secular states look after themselves? Are they too weak? Why do modern governments
look to God, to Allah, for support? Why do Indians join fundamentalist Hindu parties in which naked
ascetics share the platform with politicians? The modern state insists on a birth certificate: it
wants to know who has been born. It insists on a marriage certificate: it wants to know who marries
whom. It insists on a death certificate: it wants to know who can be struck off the books. With all
this knowledge, why does it also turn to God? One of the reasons is historical. The state was not
always distinct from the church; at one time not so very long ago religious institutions had
political and economic power in England, Scotland, and Wales. They still do in the Middle East,
where Islam and the state are indivisible. Are we, then, just seeing the past lingering on into the
present? No. There is more to life, it seems, than the secular state can encompass. People want
religion and faith; many of them could barely imagine life without these

things.

The place of religion in the modern world is as fascinating as it is difficult to account for. On
the one hand, people the world over are modernizing, either rushing or crawling toward the Western
style of living if they possibly can. In Asia Westernization has proceeded apace. In Africa it has
yet to happen in many areas, but the desire is there. Yet even where Western ideas have caught hold
with a vengeance, as in Japan, religions have maintained their existence, even multiplied and
spread. What are they doing? We shall explore this matter in detail, expecting to find religions
right at the heart of the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Reader, you mayor may not be "religious." That is a matter with which we shall not be concerned in
this book. To be religious is to believe in some supernatural power, something that mayor may not
make itself manifest, once or twice in a lifetime, or every minute of every day. We may call it
God; think of it as a vaguely apprehended essence, as in the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindus; or have
very precise, well-defined ideas about it, perhaps derived from the Old and New Testaments or the
Koran. To be religious is to be a certain kind of person, one who subjects his or her thoughts and
actions to critical appraisal in terms of a set of ideal values, who feels beholden, observed,
unalone. This can be a comforting feeling in times of crisis and a worrisome one in times of moral
uncertainty .

To be religious or irreligious is a choice available to people in the Western world, something that
some people think about a lot and others not at all. We know whether we are religious or not. We
may, from time to time, feel that we ought to be more religious than we are, or we may be strongly
atheistic. This is very much a Western phenomenon. Most people the world over are in some sense of
the word religious; they readily accept (or at least do not deny) the existence of things
supernatural, hold superstitions, accept some aspects of astrological prediction, or believe in
good and bad luck. Some Westerners prefer to call themselves agnostic and would not accept the
label of atheist. To be an atheist is to claim knowledge about the nature of the universe that one
can scarcely justify at a time when astronomers and physicists themselves are constantly writing
about God and the Creation. The atheist says, "I know better than that; I know there is nothing but
matter in the world." This, if anything, is a statement of faith. It is safer and intellectually
humbler to be an agnostic.

One reason why many of us in the West are atheists or agnostics is that we have personally
experienced the failure of our religion or its ministers to meet our needs or answer our questions
at times of crisis. This is due, in part, to the rapid rate of change in modern Western society.
One of the interesting features of the major religions, to which we shall return from time to time,
is their relative conservatism, their apparent slow pace of change, the difficulty they have in
adjusting to the world (to which, in the end, they do adjust). Old religions are full of
anachronisms and irrelevancies in a fast-changing world. Why, we shall ask, are they relatively
slow to change? Why, for example, can there still be a lively theological debate about the Virgin
Birth in Great Britain in the 1990s? On the face of it, it seems absurd. Among mammals (of which
Homo sapiens is one) virgins cannot give birth because female mammals do not produce sperm, without
which fertilization of the egg cannot occur, and so the process leading to a new individual cannot
get started. Yet bishops and archbishops argue about this. Why? The answer has to do with the
question not of virgins but of faith. Similarly, orthodox Moslems believe that the Koran is the
word of Allah. To accept the Virgin Birth, or to believe that Allah dictated the Koran, is an
example of accepting articles of faith within the Christian and Islamic traditions. Faith is
important in two ways. First, it is important to the organized church because it ensures the
survival of institutional structures and the adherence of their followers. Here we can develop
theories of religious organizations acting competitively in the free market to win over faithful
adherents, rather like firms vying for customers in the economic sphere. Second, it is important to
the adherents because of the calming and psychologically satisfying feeling it imparts to some, or
the practical course of action it imparts to others, in an insecure world.

Anthropology promotes a relativist stance in such matters. Humans have evolved from animals and
have created cultures. Different cultures have various ways of approaching the same questions. The
panoply of religions found in individual countries and cultures of the world is a colorful and
impressive display of symbolism. Quite apart from the question of whether or not God exists,
religions have provided the context for some of the most beautiful music ever composed, the noblest
works of art and architecture, arid the most colorful dances, rites, and rituals. Here, in these
joyful and anxious expressions, we see the human spirit reaching out to acknowledge, to give
thanks, to worship, to praise, to honor a deity.

At other times, when he or she is angered by human evil, the deity may need to be appeased. In
Africa, in subsistence economies, people accept the possibility that the deity may bring drought;
in ancient Greece Sophoclean drama implied that the gods brought sickness to the Thebans as a
consequence of Oedipus' incest; in medieval England the plague was attributed by theologians and
commoners alike to the sins of all, and princes in particular. In all these cases, it is necessary
for people to make sacrifices to appease the angry god or gods. The process of sacrifice is also
intelligible as a mechanism by which worried, perplexed, or frightened people grapple with immense
natural forces such as earthquakes and floods. Religious wars are also a form of response: If the
threat is social rather than natural, holy wars occur. From preaching love and peace, religions
like Christianity and Islam start preaching the virtues of death in a just cause, the moral
obligation to defend the faith, to kill the enemies of God. In today's world the West is viewed as
"satanic" by some Middle Eastern Moslem fundamentalists. What lies behind the ideological conflict?
Some would say it reflects political competition for the most valuable resource in the
world-oil-which lies buried below the Islamic countries of the Middle East yet is essential to the
continued functioning of the Christian West. If true, this would be an example of religions
articulating practical, secular, materialist concerns. One of the main objects of this book is to
demonstrate over and over how religions do just this.


Religion and the Physical World


It should not be thought that by the physical world we mean only the soil, the air, the elements,
houses, food, and other such aspects of the universe. Far from it. Life itself is physical and
material. Whether or not we believe that God instills a breath of life in each living thing, or
that we humans (and animals too, as the Northwest Coast Indians of North America and the Eskimos
believed) have souls, there can be no doubt that people and animals are physical beings. They are
made of bones, fat, water, protein, and so on. They have weight. They are subject to gravity. In
other words, we have bodies. Now it might be thought that this "body" aspect of humanity is the
aspect of least interest to religions. Surely, they are more interested in spiritual qualities than
physical ones? Is it not precisely this fact that marks religion off from, say, medicine or
biology?

Our answer is negative. Religions, the world over, are concerned with human physical existence,
human bodies, what they may and may not do, when they may and may not do it, how they should be
conceived, born, fed, cleaned, dressed, and buried. * Religions want to get involved with our
sexual behavior and with menstruation, which is the subject of religious taboos on both women, who
often have to hide away, and men, who may not have sex with them at this time without risking
pollution.

Humanity is one, and all of us have much the same preoccupationswith the welfare of our parents and
children, with keeping healthy, with forming friendships and managing enmities, with love and sex,
with status and esteem, with getting food, a place to live, a bit of leisuretime to relax and have
fun. Religions have things to say about how we should accomplish all these things, as we shall see
in the course of this book.

There is also that other preoccupation we have already mentioned, with answering the deeper
questions, about, who we are and where we come from and where we are going. These are the questions
religions specialize in and it is in regard to these deeper questions that religions claim to have
exclusive and particular access to the truth. "Jesus saves," proclaimed from a billboard, is not a
relative statement. It implies that the way to salvation is through Jesus and not through any other
route. If we seek to be saved, then we have to decide whether to give our souls to Jesus or to turn
away unsaved. Most people in modern Western cities turn away; they regard the whole thing as some
kind of spiritual con game, operated by a sect or a church trying to increase its membership, and
indeed there is an element of truth in this perception. Yet despite the impact of Westernization,
spirituality survives, not always in an orthodox form but often, as in the United States and Japan,
in the form of a plethora of small sects or even cults that meet or even live together to emphasize
the spiritual side of life. And in some parts of the modern Western world Christianity is on the
increase; for example, the Mormon form of Christianity emanating from Salt Lake City in Utah is
spreading rapidly and promises to be the mainstream form of Christianity in the United States.
Nevertheless, it is especially in the West, with its technoscientific culture, its all-pervasive
commercial consumerism, that the values of Christianity have been disregarded and downgraded. They
don't allow you to earn enough money, indeed they threaten to turn you into a pauper if you take
the gospel of Christ too literally and seriously question materialist assumptions. There is,
however, a constant interaction between religious ideas and those of secular society, and this
interaction requires much further study. Commercialism and orthodox religions have always coexisted
among the mass of the populations of, for instance, India or Peru, Thailand or Kuwait. Secularism
and profane values may at times war with, but can also come to terms with, religious values.
Atheism does not inevitably triumph: Communism bid fair to eliminate religion from the world; it
failed, and the old orthodox religions of Eastern Europe and Russia resurged in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, as soon as the stranglehold exerted on them by Communist states was relaxed.

This book isn't about anyone religion, nor is it proselytizing. We do not want any reader to
convert to some new kind of religion we are here about to offer. Rather, we write about religion as
an interesting subject. We look at "religions" in the plural rather than "religion" as an abstract
concept. We ask the following questions: "What are religions doing in the world?" "What are they
interested in?" "Why are religions still thriving, even resurging, in this secular, scientific
age?" We acknowledge that there are answers in the mystical or spiritual sphere, but religions go
further than that. It is rather too easy to reply, when asked about religion, that it is concerned
with all the things that technology and science cannot deal with, man's spiritual and moral nature.
That is true, but it is only part of the answer. Religions are also down to earth, and we believe
it is this contact with the material world that explains the continued existence of religions in
all countries, why they have survived and multiplied during history, and why they are a very real
force in the world today.

Religious Experience

This is not a book about religious experience as such. Anthropologists such as Nadell believed that
the "thrill" associated with religious experience was one of the most important reasons for its
powerful hold over people. Others have written movingly about the numinous, the ineffable or
inexplicable. Alister Hardy2 collected a very large number of accounts from ordinary people from
all walks of life in Great Britain concerning mystical experiences they had themselves had (see the
analysis by G. Al1ern).3 Often such experiences involved seeing a dazzling white light, and a
dearly beloved, now deceased person who appears and speaks. Contact with the dead is the essence of
some spiritualist movements. Speaking in tongues, or glossolalia (see Goodman),4 and other
phenomena such as automatic writing have attested to the fact that people can be moved in 'ways
quite inexplicable to conventional science. For most religious people, religious experience is the
central core of their belief; it may have a cleansing or puritying effect, and it provides for them
the proof (if any were needed) of God's existence. Music has often been held to engender such
feelings of sublime elation associated with religious experience. It has also been the case that in
quite recent times large numbers of ordinary people have seen visions of the Virgin Mary; for
example, she appeared to them over a period of several months at Medjugorje, a village in
Yugoslavia, as described by Jackson´s

In recent times, neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists have shown changes in the levels of
brain hormones, or endorphins, to be associated with such experiences. This has raised complex
questions of the relation between religious experience and other out-of-body experiences such as
those of the mentally ill and of people affected by drugs.

We can distinguish three states of mind associated with religious observances, in order of
intensity: meditation, trance, and ecstasy. There is a considerable literature on each of these,
and useful summaries of what is involved in each can be found in Lehmann and Myers' Magic)
Witchcraft and Religion.6 A variety of studies have shown that meditation can lead to changed
behavior, restructuring of consciousness and of our understanding of the realities of the world
around us. Trance goes beyond meditation in that it is a clearly defined and structured departure
from the normal state of being in which the individual considers himself or herself to be, and is
considered to others to be, involved in another world. Ecstasy is the state of mind of the person
in trance.

Our brains, as part of our bodies, exist within a cultural context, and each culture has it own
preconceptions about which brain states are normal and which are abnormal. Meditation, brought in
to Western cultures from the Oriental religions, is incompatible with normal activities at the
workplace but is becoming more popular as a way of relaxing and regaining a sense of proportion in
our own culture. Western cultures put a premium on alert states of consciousness for people in most
public contexts and frown upon states of delirium or ecstasy except in specially defined private
circumstances. In other cultures, for instance among the Yanomami of Venezuela, such states were
part of the normal life of adult men, induced by the use of drugs. Religious specialists, often
called shamans, use drugs or intoxicants in a variety of cultures to achieve cures or contact with
the spirit world. Among many African peoples, spirit possession enabled the person in trance to
know what his ancestors were thinking.

Meditation is not a single, clearly defined state of mind. Sanskrit, the religious language of
Hinduism, identifies more than twenty-two different states of consciousness, (see Schuman).
Meditation has been defined by Shapiro8 as a family of techniques which have in common a conscious
attempt to focus attention in a nonanalytical way and an attempt not to dwell on discursive
ruminating thought. Attempts to study the neurophysiology of the meditative state by comparing it
with that of resting controls have been criticized by Holmes;9 in general it appears that different
individuals show different neurophysiological patterns when meditating, and the whole experience is
very personal and specific to the individual. However, there is evidence that both alpha and theta
wave activity is changed by meditation and that these features are associated with subjectively
felt serenity and happiness.

Some meditative sects use the method to obtain enlightenment, and indeed some Indian Sadhus have
been shown to achieve a remarkably low metabolic rate and to go without movement, food, or drink
for many days while meditating. The state of mind of people in such deep meditation remains a
mystery, however. The rhythmic repetition of a verbal mantra is enjoined in some religious forms of
meditation, for instance in Zen Buddhism, and this evidently has a rhythmic effect on neural
functioning and achieves the calming function this provides.

All the literate religions have developed meditation as part of their methods for personal
betterment. Manuals for meditation exist in them all, and well-known saints in both Christianity
and Islam have practiced and publicized their own particular methods. For example, the Islamic
method of Al-Ghazali gives great importance to personal cleanliness as a necessary prerequisite to
successful meditation. This mirrors the Islamic emphasis on washing before prayer.

Trance has been defined by Shorlo as "a state in which there is functional nonawareness of the
structural frame of reference ... which supports, interprets, and gives meaning to experience." In
other words, the person in trance is in a structured situation, possibly devised especially for the
purpose; he or she is unaware of this situation while in trance, but the people watching give his
or her actions and words special meanings. Trance is also known to be infectious-one or more people
watching a "possessed" person may become possessed themselves. The classic state of possession is
seen in the Voodoo cults of Haiti, where this state of mind is linked to witchcraft and can lead to
madness and even death. Witchcraft is also found in many parts of Africa at the present time and is
associated with trance and possession of various kinds, involving demons and other occult beliefs.

In other contexts, trance may be much less associated with evil.

Among the Navaho, individuals could make Contact with spirits through trance, while among the now
extinct Mandan Indians young men in bygone times practiced severe forms of self-mutilation and
masochism in order to discover their tutelary spirits. Trancelike states are also found in
Christianity, for example among the Shakers and early Quakers, and some Pentecostal and other
fundamentalist movements at the present time; in all cases it is the entry of the spirit into the
person that accompanies the trance. Trance connects with meditation in the form of "transcendental
meditation," which is a form of self-hypnosis involving sensory deprivation. At the
neurophysiological level there appear to be no distinctive correlates of trance.

Ecstasy is an abnormal state of consciousness in which the reaction of the mind to external stimuli
is either inhibited or altered in character. The person so possessed may be impervious to messages
from without and can sometimes feel no pain. Examples of the latter include barebacked Catholic men
carrying bundles of cacti on their shoulders during a Good Friday procession in Taxco, Mexico, or
whipping themselves with thorn-studded ropes in Manila, Philippines (also on Good Friday), while
showing signs of experiencing great happiness or rapture.

Ecstatic mental states can also be induced by drugs such as LSD, magic mushrooms, or certain cactus
seeds after protracted fasting. Equally, the same state of mind can be elicited in teenagers at a
pop concert, who are in a very real sense "worshiping" their idols. As with trance, the
neurophysiology of ecstasy is very complex and varies from person to person and from one kind of
ecstasy to another. The phenomenon of ecstatic religions is treated at length by Lewis.


Complex Theologies


A very different area of study, but one every bit as complex as that of the neurological basis of
religious experience, is tl1e field of philosophical arguments about whether God exists or not, and
how to go about the matter of proof. These are issues not so much of religion as of theology and
philosophy. How do such theological issues relate to the life events of the "common man"? The
answer is, In direct terms, not at all. Theology disembodies faith and it is not the province of
theology to deal with the everyday emotional and physical happenings of ordinary people,

which are our object of attention in this book.

This matter of complex theologies raises an important point, which

needs to be borne in mind throughout the discussion of religion and the common man. This is that
for the ordinary individual in any society, religion involves a very different and much simpler set
of ideas than it does for the priests and other officials of the institutions associated with the
religion. The ordinary person may be imbued with faith, may be firm in his or her religious
convictions, may have a good working knowledge of the names of the gods or prophets or other
religious dignitaries, but is likely to be largely unaware of the debates, positions, arguments,
and sectarian disagreements that have characterized the theological history of the faith. From the
~me of the Gutenberg Bible there has developed an ever widening gulf between those who study holy
writ and those who try to live by religious principles. The points of dispute learned by the
incumbents of high religious office in the course of their training may enable them to deal with
arguments and disagreements that arise in the course of their ministry. But they are not taught as
such to the faithful, who are, rather, given the "one true version." Practicing priests do not
stand up in public and confound their congregations with opposing theological positions; indeed,
they very often decry or at best ignore the views of opposing sects.

For the "ordinary" religious person (i.e., nonpriest, nontheologian) there are a faith, a set of
beliefs, and a set of practices, some formal and some informal, such as a general attitude to the
poor or the needy. At higher levels in the structure of what we may call the "church" or the
"ministry" or the "temple" there are those in whose care are the religious texts, who study them
and are aware of their complexities. In Roman Catholicism there are, for example, edicts and
encyclicals carefully preserved, to which reference can be made in justifying a stand on, say,
abortion or birth control. The careful Catholic scholar is aware that such edicts have, at
different times, adopted different positions and that there is no unanimity in the church's
history. For example, there were severe penalties for abortion before the twelfth century,
providing for up to ten years fasting according to the age of the fetus (see Kelly)Y The Pope's
medical adviser, who in 1621 was a priest, stated that the ensoulment of the fetus took place at
fertilization. There are repeated debates in the Vatican, and the Pope's statements of dogma are
the result of such debates, in which he takes part. To the less educated public they are the words
of God, which he transmits should they be listening or even feel it necessary to listen. Sermons
have been described as being washed over by holy words. For such people there is neither time nor
need for studying the edicts of earlier centuries, nor indeed of current controversies, since they
arc believers first.

Caution is thus needed in the approach to the role of religion in relation to the common man, the
person in the street. The higher reaches of theology do not reach the people at all. Thus there is
no possibility of taking theological arguments as indicative of the part played by religions in the
world today. What religions do is bound up with the lives of ordinary people, with steering them
through the phases of their existence, and not with arguments about, with whom a married man spends
eternity after resurrection or whether or not the Prophet Mohammed traveled from Arabia to
Jerusalem in a single night.

Books such as The Philosophy of Religion by MitchellI3 and An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Religion by DaviesI4 concern themselves with falsification, verification, free will; whether God
exists, whether it is reasonable to debate this, whether faith needs to be based on verifiable
assertions or falsifiable ones; and so on. Arguments in this field are based on logic: there is no
sense of the social significance of religion or its functions for individual human beings living in
the real world. Philosophers of religion are concerned with arguments, proof, -reason, and belief.
If we do not concern ourselves with these matters in the following pages, it is not because. we
regard them as irrelevant to the study of religion. They are highly relevant to the study of any
religion. Our book, however, is not a philosophical one, nor are we philosophers. We leave those
fundamental matters (which, philosophers agree, are unlikely ever to be resolved) to one side; we
accept that many people believe in gods and spirits, and we work forward from there, to ask
questions about what those beliefs are, how they affect people's thoughts and actions, and what
their functions might be for individuals in the context of their social and physical existence.

Finally there are questions about the relation between religion and morality. Philosophers such as
Helmis have debated whether morality arises out of religion or vice versa, and how rationality,
humanism, and other secular bases for morality and ethics are related to the values embodied in
religious belief and doctrine. Such questions are debated mainly in traditional terms, with
reference to Christian culture and Western morality only, and have as a result only limited general
applicability to a worldwide survey. For our purposes they tackle an interesting question in the
modern, doubting world of the West. Mitchell's book is subtitled The Dilemma of the Traditional
Conscience, which gives the clue as to how the author sees things: The problem at issue is how to
comprehend a Christian approach to morality in an increasingly secular world, one in which moral
judgments are increasingly being made on secular, non-Christian grounds.

This is indeed a problem for Christians, but it is not one for Moslems or the propitiators of
ancestors living south of the Sahara. They may, of course, have equivalent problems, arising from
the collapse of traditional life and the advent of Western secularization. We are interested in
these matters, as the following pages will show. Religions, it appears to us, have to adapt to
changing environments. In particular, what may be called "intensive growth" can change levels of
real wealth in societies and lighten the struggle for existence for many people, one among several

causes of the decline of religion in the West.

We see morality as prior, logically and evolutionarily, to religions. We derive morality from
evolutionary processes operating on the reciprocal behavior of intelligent creatures living in
social groups. In this we follow the ideas of Alexander. 16 There is thus no problem of priority;
the matter is settled. Our position is that morality is "natural," and no doubt some philosophers
will want to point out that this position is untenable in various ways. Nevertheless, it is
buttressed by many sound arguments within biology, anthropology, and primatology into which moral
philosophers

have not yet extended their considerations.

One final note. Some people, when they hear the word religion today, point straight to the fact
that religions have been the cause of wars throughout history, that we can no longer, in the modern
world, risk the dangers of allowing religious fanaticism to cause rifts and wars and assassinations
in the world. All too recently, Saddam Hussein, in an Iraq under siege, called for a jihad, an
Islamic holy war, against the United States and its allies. And as we write, Moslem and Christian
forces are fighting each other in what used to be Yugoslavia and in parts of the old Soviet Union.
We acknowledge this side of religions. Religiously inspired armies can be terribly dangerous. The
call by political and military leaders to their subjects to die a glorious death for their faith,
as was repeatedly made by Iranian and Iraqi leaders in recent wars, is one of the strongest appeals
they can make and is frequently heard in times of war. This indeed is the dark side of faith.

There are exceptions. Within Christianity certain pacificist sects, notably the Quakers, refuse to
fight at times of war, whatever the circumstances and whoever the enemy may be. In Buddhism and
Hinduism, passive resistance can be the religious response to attack, whatever the consequences.
But in the main, religious institutions are closely linked with the political heart of their
country and fall in line with political ambitions for conquest or political necessities in defense.
War is a territying catastrophe, and hence the context in which religions play a large part. While
deploring religious wars and the role of religions in war, we have to try to understand why things
are so and not be dismissive. Just as religions concern themselves with birth, marriage, and death,
so they also do with war. When religion supports expansionist aggression, it exposes

its Achilles heel, and who can be blamed for rejecting it?

But let us not end this chapter on a negative note. Let us return to our question "Why religions?"
What is it that takes people to their local church on Sundays, leads them to fold their hands in
prayer and speak to an invisible, half-understood deity? Why do Japanese followers of Shinto hang
little pieces of paper with prophecies on the branches of a sacred tree? Why do Moslems kneel on
floor mats facing Mecca and bow their heads low five times a day? Why do Hindus ring a bell to call
up one of the local gods, and leave offerings of rice and flowers at his or her temple? Why do
Afican villagers sacrifice a goat to propitiate their ancestors who are thought to be angry?

We must never forget the sheer complexity of our chosen topic. The outer forms of religious
actions, and their underlying meanings, are as diverse as they could be. We seek in vain for one
underlying meaning to explain them all. Anthropologists are humbled by the complexity of this
subject. As Max Weber wrote in his book Ancient Judaism, 17 "It would require more than a lifetime
to acquire a true mastery of the literature." And he was writing of Judaism alone. In the present
book we are not concerned with the literature or the official theology of the world's faiths, but
rather with what people do when they are acting in religious ways.

Again, the distinguished anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard 18 wrote, "Generalizations about
'religion' are discreditable. They are always too ambitious and take account of only a few of the
facts. The anthropologist should ... restrict himself to religions of a certain type ... in favour
of limited conclusions reached by inductive analysis of observed facts" (pp. 6-7). Nevertheless
anthropologists such as Guy Swanson, i~ The Birth of the GOdS,19 after quoting both of the
preceding warnings, pointed out that science proceeds both by careful descriptions of particular
cases and by generalizations: "The movement of scientific knowledge requires both, and both should
have the resources to play their equally indispensable parts" (p. viii). With this statement we are
in agreement, and it forms the basis of the present work.

Swanson was concerned with the origins of religious beliefs, and his own generalizations followed a
Durkheimian approach. This approach seeks to understand the origins of the forms of religious (or
supernatural) experience in the forms and powers of society itself. Man is to society as a
worshipper is to a god.

This is not our own approach, or the method of generalization to be found in the present work. Our
approach is not concerned with the origins of religions so much as their functions. We relate and
explain the force of religious ideas by reference to the needs of individuals in their everyday
lives, not to society and its forms. If the Durkheimian approach can explain the forms religions
take or the particular beliefs they emphasize, it does not seem to us to emphasize with sufficient
force the real part played by religion in the lives of actual people. As a result of our
investigations we have become convinced by the evidence worldwide that the function of religions is
to respond to human needs, to help people at times of personal crisis (e.g., at funerals), or when
they are undergoing a change of status (e.g., at weddings), or generally in relation to the
everyday strains of normal life. Ours is thus a functional approach.

It is also, in the anthropological tradition, comparative. So many books and writings about
religion in the Western literature concern themselves either with Christianity alone or with
Christianity and impossible. The field worker who goes out to study a people in the heart of Africa
or another part of the underdeveloped world finds immediately that the concepts of Christianity, or
Judeo-Christianity, are either missing or greatly changed. There may be no churches, no priests, no
concept of sin, no evidence of religious morality, no special time of day for "services," no actual
"prayer," no universal god. Instead, parts of the landscape may be held sacred as in Australia,
spells may be cast into the storm to calm the wind and the ocean as in the Trobriand Islands, crops
may be unable to grow without prayers as in South America, and pregnancy may be, in part at least,
the result of a spirit's entering a woman's belly (Australia again).

The comparative approach underlies the whole of this book. It does not explicitly compare one
religion with another, or concentrate on its modern manifestations. It compares by juxtaposing the
various ways different religions approach the same basic human situations. There is a great
strength in this approach: All humans pass through essentially the same phases of the lifecycle.
There is thus a common basis for comparison. We are born; we reach puberty; we encounter
disappointment, disease, and death; and in due course we too die. Some of us remain single but most
get married and have children, some get divorced, many are widowed. In short, there is a basic
pattern to life everywhere and we have found that religions play their main roles in relation to
this pattern.