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The Footprints of the World's Major Religions

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The Footprints of the World's Major Religions The Footprints of the World’s Major Religions by W B (Ben) Vosloo January 2016 The Footprints of the World’s Major Religions CONTENTS Page The World’s Religious Make-up 1 The Roles of Religions 1 Religiosity and Cultural Diversity 2 Religion as Source of Cleavage 3 Religiosity and Modernisation 4 Judaism and Jewry 5 The Core of Judaism 6 The Birth of Judaism 6 Doctrinal Foundations 7 The Jewish Diaspora and the Growth of Anti-Semitism 15 Judaism and the Jews Today 26 International Jewry and Modern Capitalism 31 Judaism in Retrospect 33 Bibliography 34 The Rise and Decline of Christianity 35 Christianity and the Bible 35 The Apostolic Preaching 36 The Canon of Scripture and the Christian Creed 36 Christianity and Western Civilisation 37 The Birth of Christianity 37 The Spread of Christianity Across the Roman Empire 40 Christianity in the Middle Ages 42 The Renaissance (13th and 14th Centuries) 43 The Reformation and the Rise of Religious Cleavages 46 The Spread of Christianity in the New World 49 Religious Refugees, Sects and Doubters 51 Impact of the French and the Industrial Revolutions 53 Church/State Separation and Religious Tolerance in the West 54 The Spread of Christianity (1780-1914) 56 Anti Christian Ideologies 56 Christianity and Science 58 God’s Wrath and Blessings 59 Christian Ethics and Political/Economic Life 59 The Emergence of European Social-Democratic Economies 60 Doctrinal Foundations of Socialist Welfarism 60 Mixed Economies 61 Comprehensive Social Security Schemes 62 Taxation Rather Than Nationalisation 63 Industrial Democracy 63 Ageing Populations 64 The Decline of Religiosity 64 Max Weber and Freud 65 The Decline of Christianity’s Role 66 Bibliography 68 CONTENTS (continued) Page The Ascendancy of Islam 69 Pillars of Islam 69 The Birth and Ascent of Islam 70 Trends in Islamic Doctrine 72 Members of the Islamic Arab World 76 Non-Arab Muslim States 77 Characteristics of Islamic Statehood 77 Profile of Islamic States in the Arab World 82 Profile of Non-Arab Muslim States 86 Urgent Need for Reform in Islamic States 88 Stirrings of Social Change 90 The Muslim Diaspora and its Consequences 91 Islamification of Europe 94 Jihadist Infiltration 96 The Ideological Struggle 97 Bibliography 102 Hinduism’s Renunciation of Worldly Things 103 Essence of Hinduism 103 Indigenous Character 103 Hindu Scriptures 104 The Multiple Deities of Hinduism 104 The Process of Renunciation 105 Foreign Invaders 105 The Legacy of British India 105 Independence and Partitioning 106 India’s Cultural Diversity 107 Indian Politics 109 India’s Economy 111 The Infrastructure Handicap 114 Policy Paralysis 115 Intergroup Conflict and Violence 116 India’s Potential 118 India’s Challenges 119 Bibliography 119 Confucianism Combined with Buddhism and Taoism as Modernising Forces in East Asia 120 Buddhism 120 The Teachings of Buddha 120 Branches of Buddhism 122 Buddhism in China 123 Buddhism in Japan 124 Taoism 125 Confucianism 127 The Core of Confucianism 128 CONTENTS (continued) Page Confucianism Combined with Buddhism and Taoism as Modernising Forces in East Asia (contd) Western Missionary Work in East Asia 133 Japan’s Reconstruction 134 The Thrust of Soviet Communism into Korea 134 The Impetus of the Korean Wars to Japan’s Economic Growth 135 South Korea’s Emancipation 135 Taiwan’s Confucian Capitalism 136 Singapore and the Impetus of Overseas Chinese 137 Mainland China’s Oppressive Communist Regime 138 The Revival of Confucian Capitalism 138 Bibliography 140 Concluding Remarks 141 The Abrahamic Religions 141 Doctrinal Divergence Between Islam and ‘the People of the Book’ 143 India’s Emergence 144 East Asian Modernisation 145 The Correlation Between Religion-based Ethical Values 145 Foreword Writing about religion is always fraught with pitfalls, because religion does not lend itself to casual rational analysis or discourse. It is based on what people believe about matters on which they hold strong convictions. History has only a few examples of people sacrificing their lives for the sake of a rational conclusion, but millions and millions of people have offered their lives on the altar of the beliefs they have held. The text of this manuscript has been written with careful consideration for the sensibilities and beliefs of the faiths concerned without sacrificing honest and realistic analysis. Despite the caution taken, it is possible that specific depictions are influenced by the Christian cultural background and agnostic convictions of the author. As such it may not always accord with the understanding of each and every reader. No offence is intended. 1 The Footprints of the World’s Major Religions by W B Vosloo* - Wollongong, January 2016 By “religion” is meant any belief system based on the idea that there is an omniscient, supreme deity or intelligence or force equipped with the capability to act as the designer, creator and mover of the entire universe, including everything in it – all natural and moral phenomena. Most religions are characterised by both dogmatic and ritualistic aspects. The dogmatic refers to perceptions of divine revelations and the ritualistic to the rites or ceremonies embedded in historical tradition but symbolically related to the beliefs held. The dogmatic and the ritualistic elements of religion normally find expression in organisational structures such as churches, shrines and priesthoods. The World’s Religious Make-up The predominant religions in today’s world are Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Confucianism is often classified as a moral code rather than a religion. These belief systems have crossed national boundaries and their followers add up to millions of people and, in the case of Islam and Christianity, more than a billion each. Other religions, such as Zoroastrianism, Shintoism, Taoism and Sikhism, are largely local and are inseparably related to small- scale traditional societies. Although hard numbers in questions of faith are scarce, the Pew Research Centre, a “fact tank” in Washington D.C., issued a report in 2010 on the state of religious belief around the world. It estimates that around 5.9 billion adults and children – approximately 84 percent of the world population in 2010 – have some kind of religious affiliation. Even of the over 1 billion persons who are unaffiliated, many profess some belief in a higher power. Asia has by far the largest number of people who claim to have no religion, most of whom are Chinese – living in an officially atheist country. But 44 percent of Chinese respondents in the Pew survey claimed that they have worshipped at a gravesite or tomb in the past year. China also has the world’s seventh-largest Christian population, estimated at 68 million persons. The report of the Pew Research Centre states that in 2010 of the 5.9 billion religious believers the distribution of religious affiliation was as follows: Christian 31.5 percent, Muslim 23.2 percent, Hindu 15 percent, Buddhist 7.1 percent, Folk/Traditional 5.9 percent, Jewish 0.2 percent. Other (including Sikh, Shintoist, Taoist, Janoist) 0.8 percent. The median age of religious groups was highest (between 30-40 years of age) for Jews, Buddhist, Folk/Traditional and “other” categories. For Christians the median age was 30 years of age, for Hindu around 25 and for Muslims around 22 years of age. Around one quarter of the world’s believers live as religious minorities. (See The Economist, December 22nd, 2012, to January 4th, 2013, p.96) The Roles of Religions The most important of these roles include the following: - offering an account of the origins and nature of reality and humanity’s relationship with it; - offering a basis for communal identity, social affiliation, cultural cohesion and territorial attachments; - offering a foundation for moral values such as thinking and feeling about what is right, just, fair and preferable, true and universally compelling; 2 - offering a sense of sacred mission exerting a profound hold upon people’s emotions and imagination while providing a fertile source of social and political cleavage driven by assumptions of a divine or supernatural imperative. The human-based origins of religiosity are a matter of dispute. However, it is clear that since ancient times human beings have tended to speculate about things unknown to them. Systematic methods of inquiry and a body of accumulated knowledge only advanced slowly and often ambiguously. Before the scientific method of inquiry emerged in the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era, people had to rely on other sources of knowledge: their imaginations or illusions, their observations or experiences and often on the utterances or teachings of persuasive individuals among them. The common element in all the historical examples of perceptions of “gods” or “spirits” is that they purport to explain the otherwise mysterious workings of nature and human experience. These dynamics are explained in supernatural terms – at least in terms that today’s scientific world would consider as “super-natural”. Religiosity and Cultural Diversity Since the times of Plato and Aristotle students of human affairs have noticed that mankind does not live in isolation: humans only become human in association with others. However, every individual person has a multiplicity of potential attractions to other human beings – each source of attraction forming a potential focus of social solidarity. These sources of solidarity can be depicted as a series of concentric circles: family, community, clan, culture, race, religion, nationality, etc. The range and structure of each person’s circles of solidarity usually determines the social walls separating “us” from “them”. Each society tends to develop its own pattern of social solidarity depending on its geographical determinants and its history of self-awareness. In modern times the process of nation-building involved the integration of sub-national pockets of cultural identity into some form of common nationhood. It involves the gradual absorption of diverse forms of self-enclosed, sub-national loyalties (sometimes called cultural pluralism) into inclusive national identification patterns.
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