Communicating Religion Ms. Megha Jaiswal PGDPC XV Executive
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Communicating Religion Communicating Religion Ms. Megha Jaiswal PGDPC XV Executive Summary Religion is a topic which is most sacred to majority of the people. People are born by it and they die by it. Religious sentiments are ingrained in people right from the time they can comprehend things. There are many sections of people who are frantic about their religion. From centuries before, religion has been communicated to keep people informed about the God’s messages, to transform them and to spread the religion beyond boundaries. Religion has lead to many wars, bloodshed as well as it unites people and forms communities. Our religious belief raises its head on an everyday basis whether in terms of superstition, habit or conscious decisions. Religion is the crux of any society and forms its beliefs and ideas. Since time immemorial religion has been injected in people’s blood. Earlier times saw priests or hermits, maulvi’s and Pope spreading knowledge about religion. Even now the scene hasn’t changed much but with digitalization coming in, things have become more high tech. There are different ways through people choose to communicate about their faith in order to inform, address or transform people and this thesis focuses on a few of those. Evangelism- Evangelism is the practice of relaying information about a particular set of beliefs to others who do not hold those beliefs. Throughout most of its history, Christianity has been spread evangelistically, though the extent of evangelism has varied significantly between Christian communities, and denominations. Music- At its most basic level, gospel music is sacred music. It is a unique phenomenon of Americana which had its earliest iterations toward the end of the nineteenth century. It is folk music which suggests that it and its secular counterparts are greatly influenced by each other. Just as much of the contemporary gospel music of today sounds like R & B and Hip- Hop, so did most of the early gospel music sound like the Blues. Gospel, meaning "good news," derived its name from it close connection with the gospels (books in the New Testament). 1 Communicating Religion Literature- Religion and literature spring from the same fundamental sources. Not only do religion and literature spring from the same fundamental sources, they also are formed by the same forces. They both make a constant appeal to life. The translation of the Bible into Gothic by Ulphilas not only preserved the Bible, but also helped to create and to perpetuate literature. Luther's translation of the Bible and the King James' Version are not only themselves great literatures, but also have helped to form great literatures in modern life. Websites- Religion has been given new wings by modern day people to reach out to millions others. Technology has helped it spread its wings. Numerous religious websites have come up which preach and influence peoples thinking. 2 Communicating Religion Note: The following are the important excerpts from the thesis, please contact the institute for the full Thesis Report. Introduction Religion Religion is a cultural system that creates powerful and long-lasting meaning, by establishing symbols that relate humanity to truths and values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life. They tend to derive morality, ethics,religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature. The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system, but religion differs from private belief in that it has a public aspect. Most religions have organized behaviors, including congregations for prayer, priestly hierarchies, holy places, and/or scriptures. Academics studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories: world religions, a term which refers to transcultural, international faiths, indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific religious groups, and new religious movements, which refers to recently developed faiths. The development of religion has taken different forms in different cultures. Some religions place greater emphasis on belief, while others emphasize practice. Some religions focus on the subjective experience of the religious individual, while others consider the activities of the community to be most important. Some religions claim to be universal, believing their laws and cosmology to be binding for everyone, while others are intended to be practiced only by one, localized group. Religion often makes use of meditation, music and art. In many places it has been associated with public institutions such as education, the family, government, and political power. One of the more influential theories of religion today is social constructionism, which says that religion is a modern concept suggesting all spiritual practice and worship follows a model similar to Christianity; social constructionism suggests that religion, as a concept, has therefore been applied inappropriately to non-Western cultures. 3 Communicating Religion Religion (from O.Fr. religion "religious community," from L. religionem (nom. religio) "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods, obligation, the bond between man and the gods") is derived from the Latin religiō, the ultimate origins of which are obscure. One possibility is derivation from a reduplicated *le-ligare, an interpretation traced to Cicero connecting lego "read", i.e. re (again) + legoin the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligare "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius. The medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: "we hear of the 'religion' of the Golden Fleece, of a knight 'of the religion of Avys'". According to the philologist Max Müller, the root of the English word "religion", the Latin religio, was originally used to mean only "reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety" (which Cicero further derived to mean "diligence"). Max Müller characterized many other cultures around the world, including Egypt, Persia, and India, as having a similar power structure at this point in history. What is called ancient religion today; they would have only called "law". Many languages have words that can be translated as "religion", but they may use them in a very different way, and some have no word for religion at all. For example, the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as "religion", also means law. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between "imperial law" and universal or "Buddha law", but these later became independent sources of power. There is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. One of its central concepts is "halakha", sometimes translated as "law"", which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life. The use of other terms, such as obedience to God or Islam are likewise grounded in particular histories and vocabularies. 4 Communicating Religion Evolution of Religion Religion's success is undeniable. It is in every culture, and in every corner of the world. We spend billions and billions of dollars on building monuments to it, supporting it, and of course proselytizing on behalf of our own favored brand of it. Individuals give up sex and eschew family and friends for religion. Beyond that, we sacrifice time and effort to its rituals, and indoctrinate our children and grandchildren to do the same. We are even willing to kill for it. Modern science, particularly modern biology, has given us the freedom to shuck off the idea that our existence and the existence of the universe requires an intelligent being. In fact, as Richard Dawkins pointed out in The God Delusion, invoking an intelligent being doesn't explain anything -- it just pushes the question back to 'Who designed the designer?' Despite the illogic of believing that some great being in the heavens, capable of creating not only the laws of physics, the principles of evolution, and the vastness of time also cares a great deal about whether or not you use your left hand to clean up after defecating, eat a cracker while sinless, or not mix cheese with chicken, we still seem to sup it up like mother's milk. The reason religion is so successful is that it taps into our primal-brains in much the same way that a Big Mac does -- only more so. Religion gained its foothold by hijacking the need to give purpose at a time when humans had only their imagination -- as opposed to the evidence and reason that we have today -- to fathom their world. Spirits and demons were the explanation for illnesses that we now know are caused by bacterial diseases and genetic disorders. The whims of the gods were why earthquakes, volcanos, floods and droughts occurred. Our ancestors were driven to sacrifice everything from goats to one another to satisfy those gods. Along with the need to attribute purpose, our faculty to intuit the intent of others spills over into a predilection for determining the intentions of gods and goddesses (or spirits, demons, and angels). Of course the major problem has been that we can never quite agree among ourselves about god's intentions, which often ends in unfortunate violent discussions. Our evolved proclivity for aggression feeds into that as well. We justify our prejudices, hatred, 5 Communicating Religion murders, and war by attributing our own biases to a god. As long as we kill in god's name, we are doing good.