Sociology Lecture Notes

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. Notes on Religion Phil Bartle . . The Sociology of Religion: .... In Sociology, we study religion in a manner different from how it is studied in theology. . Theology is all about “Theo” (God). . As a science, Sociology can not prove or disprove the existence of God, but it can look at the social ramifications, social organisation and social functions of belief systems, rituals, celebrations, beliefs, values and practices. . See the paper on the Beliefs Dimension. .

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. Early Sociological Contributions: .... One of the earliest contributions to sociology was by Max Weber, who was contradicting the materialist approach of Karl Marx. . Marx wrote that social organisation was a function of modes of production, that the change in technology from agrarian to industrial caused a class transformation from aristocrats and peasants to factory owners and workers. . Weber, in contrast, suggested that the new values preached by the protestants, from Martin Luther to John Calvin, included a rejection of the decadence and corruption of the Christian Church (now called Catholic) and the promotion of asceticism, frugality and independent thinking, which contributed to a culture of saving and investment, necessary for the creation and development of capitalism. . He wrote this in, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. . Another classic work is by Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. . While examining the religious characteristics of the simplest societies, Durkheim reached the conclusion that religion in some ways is the essence of society, codifying norms and values, and holding communities together. . Karl Marx saw religion as an “opiate of the masses” implying that it was a kind of social sedative. . It calmed the frustrations of the oppressed, obfuscating their awareness of the causes of their oppression with a false consciousness, and thus hindered revolution and rebellion. . Religion served the purposes of the power elite. . If, following the ideas of Max Weber in getting inside peoples’ thoughts, we want to understand more about various religions, we could look at some of the variations of belief systems of different religions. . The intention here is not to preach the beliefs, but recall them in understanding their relations to social organisation. .

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. Religion and Earlier Societies: .... In the broad sweep of human history, the trend has been for change from many spiritual entities, or gods, to few gods, polytheism, to one god, monotheism, to no god, atheism. . This paralleled the broad changes in technologies from gathering and hunting, to agrarian, to industrial, to post industrial or information technology. . Many people assume that monotheism was invented by Moses, who had an Egyptian, not a Hebrew name, or that the Jews were the first monotheists.  Nope. . The earliest known monotheists were the Zoroastrians. . The religion originated in ancient Persia, named after their prophet, Zarathustra or Zoroaster. . Because of later religious persecution by Moslems, many fled and their descendants can be found around Bombay today. . They do not cremate their corpses because it might offend the spirit of fire, or bury them in the earth or ocean for similar reasons, so they put them up on platforms on towers so the birds might finish them off. . There is evidence suggesting that ancient Hebrew society was based upon matriliny prior to Moses and monotheism. . If you want to become an Israeli, you must show that your mother was a Jew, then you qualify. . Equally, there is a suggestion that ancient Celtic societies in the highlands of Scotland and Ireland were matrilineal prior to the introduction of Feudalism and Christianity.  While matriliny is not matriarchy, matrilineal societies are usually characterized with relatively high prestige, power and wealth for women.  See my Akan Case Study. . An important concept in the religions usually associated with gathering and hunting societies is animism. . The word derives from the classical word “anima” which means life force, fire or soul. . The belief includes the idea that all natural things, mountains, rocks trees, rivers animals, are possessed by some anima, or living supernatural force. . In First Nations beliefs is the idea that the world is built upon the back of a giant turtle. . The importance of animals in their beliefs cannot be underestimated.  Creation myths often refer to a time in the past when there was no time, when the great spirits (gods) were those of animals.  The live animals of today are merely small mortal manifestations of those ancient giant Animal Gods. . Canadian First Nations, unlike the agricultural and industrial societies of Europe, Asia and Africa, did not see themselves as in conflict with nature, but in harmony with nature. . This notion is consistent with the beliefs and practices of other gatherers and hunters, such as the Pygmies and the Khoisan.  While dependent upon game for their livelihood, hunters pray to the great spirit of the animal they are about to kill. . Occasionally we can find some evidence that some supernatural entities had their origins in physically present beings. . The mmoetia are an example.  The Akan believe in little beings that are poorly translated as “dwarves.” . They are described as being short, reddish in colour and having knees on backwards.  They are said to live in the rain forest, are vegetarians, and can cause some minor mishaps and bad luck to happen to humans. . Some bananas and perhaps other fruit and eggs are often set out at night as gifts to entice them not to bring bad luck.  In that, they resemble the hobgoblins of Europe, and the “trick or treat” traditions of Halloween where little gifts of sweets are given to ensure they do not perpetrate tricks. . Now it appears that the mmoetia were historical residents of the rain forests, genetically related to the Khoisan peoples of the Kalahari and the Pygmies of Uganda and Congo. . They are gatherers and hunters who once inhabited the whole of Africa, and were pushed into marginal areas because of the expansion of the agricultural black Africans of today. .

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. Religion and Agriculture: .... With the agricultural revolution, the theology changed. . Gods became fewer, and more often were concentrated on specific endeavours, such as warfare, reproduction and fertility. . Unlike the hunters, most agrarians saw nature as the enemy. . Ancient Egypt, formerly part of the great green belt that was continuous from what is now Morocco to what is now Delhi, became more dependent upon the flooding of the Nile while humans were busy creating the Sahara desert. . Yes, the desert is not a natural phenomenon, but is a product of two human tools, fire and goats. . Fire was used for slash and burn agriculture in preparing the soil for planting, and goats, unlike sheep and cows, eat the grass down to below the surface of the soil, hindering it from growing up again. . The Sahara Desert continues to expand at the rate of several hundred square kilometres per year. . Meanwhile the Sun God, which was a manifestation of the Nile River God, and also manifested by the early dynasty (ie Black African) Egyptian kings, was the centre of their theology. . The calendar, and their annual cycle of rituals, were based upon the annual flooding of the Nile, on which their agricultural production became totally dependent. . Hinduism is an alloy of many agrarian beliefs, particularly pantheism and polytheism, deriving from the ancient Persian language and culture, Sanskrit, the father of all Indo-European languages. Today, Hindus see Sanskrit as the holy language. . Being in favour of tolerance, these different religions, when they came into contact with each other, explained the variations in names of Gods by saying they were different reincarnations of the same gods. . The belief shared in Hindu religions is that idea that we are all reincarnated and somehow where we are reincarnated may be a function of how good we were in previous lives. . This is the theological basis of the caste system where one cannot change castes or marry outside one’s caste from birth to death. . The objective of the religion is to get off this great circle of birth and rebirth, to attain Nirvana which is best translated as Great Nothingness, a very different concept from that of heaven. .

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. How Far Can We Go with Reincarnation? .... Imagine for a moment that you were God. . You are alone but you could create whatever you wanted. Well, create a universe in which you could play. . To have others to play with, you create the ability to forget so that you could exist in various forms, and forget that you also exist in the other forms with which you are interacting. . Create reincarnation, and make it so you could be reincarnated at any time in the future or the past. . Enter into all the things you create so you could experience them. . That means you are who you are right now, as an incarnation of God, and everyone around you is a different incarnation of yourself, as God. . We are all God. . How is that for a spin on theology? .

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. Religion and Suppression of Free Thinking: .... The bishops of Rome clearly felt threatened by the Hindu concept of Nirvana. . They did not like even to put a positive name to the concept of nothingness. . That is why our present calendar does not have a year zero, the year before 1 AD is the year 1 BC. . It was deemed to be heresy to use the number zero, indeed to use the so called Arabic numeral system, the one we use today. . Zero was not invented by the Arabs, but by Hindu aristocrats, Brahman scholars, and then Arab traders adopted it and brought it to Europe. . Europeans were forbidden by the Christian Church to use any number system other than Roman Numerals, which has no zero. .

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. The Shift to Monotheism: .... When the dominant religion in a society is polytheism, and there is a cult which promotes a switch to monotheism, then there is a rising problem of what to do with all the other Gods. . The CEO of the polytheistic supernatural was Jove. . When Jove was converted to Jehovah (Yawah) by the monotheists, they had to do something benign to all the other gods. . Killing them would cause a backlash among their worshippers. . The invention of angels took care of that problem. . Thus originated the angels. A wise management decision to give them a promotion to a place where they could not exercise independent power. . Saturn, the Latin name for Jove, gave his special day to become the Sabbath or sacred day of the monotheists, Saturday. . Many observers suggest that the conversion to monotheism was also the promotion of patriarchal ideology, reinforced by the view that God was a He with absolute powers. . Among the Akan, where the language does not have separate and different pronouns for he and she, the Supreme being is neither male nor female, but both. . Feminists, of course, know that She is Female. .

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. Knowing: .... Some people classify themselves as agnostics. . The word simply means “Do not know.” The “g” in agnostic is related to the “k” in our word, “know.”  “Agnostic” is a Greek word, the Latin equivalent of which is “ignoramus.” . Recall the earlier discussion of epistemology, the study of how we know. . Among the four ways of knowing, only the first two, observing and reasoning, belong to science. . The third, faith or belief, is the means on which religions are based. . This irrational foundation on which huge houses of cards are built, religion, is truly an example of building a house on the sand. . The notion that man created God in his own image is the basis of Atheism. . Buddhism does not have a theology, and remains neutral about beliefs in God or gods. . Rather it is a method of searching for enlightenment.  The method involves meditating and looking inward. .

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. From Sacred and Profane to Secular: .... If we look at the broad sweep of human history, and if we look at the range of societies from simple to complex, there are a few trends we can identify. . On the left side of the diagram of the six dimensions we see that most if not all time and space is divided into two categories, sacred and profane. . As we move along to the right in that diagram, we see increasing amounts of space and time that are secular, ie neither profane nor sacred. . As with change in other dimensions, belief change tends to be cumulative (adding new to old) rather than revolutionary (total replacement of new for old). . That, in turn, contributes to another generality, that social and cultural changes tend to be in the direction of simpler to more complex. . Although modern Christianity does not include the idea of reincarnation or life after death (until the coming again of Christ), many people continue to claim to be in touch with their dead relatives, and many psychics claim to be able to talk to ghosts. . Many Hollywood movies, our modern myths, build on the idea of dead people being able to communicate with live ones, and these modern myths (movies) reveal an underlying belief in the existence of ancestors and ghosts in western society. . The word “Easter” which is related to the words “oestrous” and “oyster,” is an Eastern European Springtime fertility custom. . Eggs have been used around the world in many cultures in fertility customs.  When an Akan girl has her first menstrual flow, for example, her mother gives her an egg (forbidden to be eaten by children. . Today we tend to associate Christmas trees with the Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, and to associate Easter eggs with the Christian celebration of the rising of Christ from being dead. . Bringing an evergreen tree into the house for winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, December 21, and putting candles on it (to encourage the return of the sun), and putting fruits on it (to make the earth fertile again) is a pre Christian Northern European annual rebirth custom. . Martin Luther is reputed to have brought it into Christian practices, but he did not invent the custom. . Unlike deciduous trees, the evergreens were used because they remained “alive” (green) through the winter. . See my essay on the forty two day cycle created by the fusing of the Semitic seven day week with an earlier West African six day week. “Forty Days; The Akan Calendar.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Volume 48,  Number 1  January 1978,  pp 80-4, reproduced on my web site. . In Akan pre Christian religion, every person (and every god) remembered, was named after and celebrated his or her weekday of birth as a personal Sabbath. . Onyame, the Supreme God, was said to be born on Saturday.  Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, changed his name from Kofi Nwieh to Kwame, after doing some research and discovering that many historical leaders, including Hitler, Napoleon and Alexander, were born on Saturday, the day of power. . Since children are named according to their weekday, and since they do not record year of birth, children are told to put their right hand over the top of the head to touch their left ear.  If they cannot, they are too young to start school, and if they can they are deemed old enough to attend school. . .

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. Peace and Religion: .... It is ironic that most major religions today preach the value of peace and tolerance, yet religions lay behind many military conflicts and violence. . The problem lies in the notion that when some people have a belief, they then claim that it is the only one which is valid or permissible. . The idea can be put as, “we support peace and tolerance so long as you recognize that only we have the only truth.” . Since religions are based on the non rational method of knowing, belief, then it is inevitable that there will be different interpretations about the nature of God, and what God might tell us to do. . This, therefore, is the recipe for conflict and violence. . Its force is increased today with a religion which supports the notion of martyrdom and willingness to kill in the name of God, and commit suicide for doing so, so as to reach a reward in heaven. . If God is not satisfied with a single species of beetle, why would God want a single religion? (There are hundreds of thousands of beetle species). . Many universal religions, ie those which seek converts, assume an ethnocentric notion, that they are better than other religions. . The Christian use of upper case letters to begin the word "God," is one subtle way this is manifested, while they use lower case letters to begin the word "gods" of other religions. . The use of the word "spirits" to designate the great animal Gods of First Nations religions, is another way to demean the belief systems of non Christians. . This ethnocentrism is one of the motivating factors that results in conflict based upon religious beliefs. . If Christianity means to value peace, forgiveness, love and tolerance, then count me as one.  If, in contrast, it means irrational beliefs such as taking the life of Christ as historical, notions such as virgin birth, execution then coming back to life, or other literal interpretations of the bible, then I am a heretic. .

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. Truth and History: .... Tom Harpur, former Anglican pastor, who teaches theology in Toronto, talks about using parables to teach truths that go beyond our usual comprehension. . The related story itself, as a metaphor, may be fiction, but the truth that lies behind the story is the true message. . After studying Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Harpur demonstrates that every story in the bible was already known in early Egyptian religion, dating 3,000 years earlier. . Do a Google search of Kuhn and you will find many poisonous essays about him by the Christian Taliban; ie fanatic literalists. Their arguments are ad hominum (against the person) rather than logical refutation of his ideas. . Going on from there, he argues that there was no historical Jesus Christ (Jesus being the Greek word for Joshua which did not appear until 400 ad), but the teachers of the true message of Christianity (love, forgiveness, tolerance, spiritual growth) had meant the story of Jesus as a parable to teach that truth, not for us to think of him as existing in history. . The Roman records of the day, which were very detailed, which included court cases and punishments, did not include what would have been the biggest judicial event of the times, the state execution of someone accused of being “The King of the Jews.” . There is an interesting parallel, using fiction to communicate a truth, in the study of sociology.  My first sociology teacher, the late Stanford Lyman, told us that sometimes fiction can be used to describe and explain a community better than all the formal and scientific reports could.  As an example, he asked us to read the work of fiction, Hawaii, by James Mitchener. . Because he could do things in fiction that could not be done in a sociological report, Mitchener was able to describe and explain many elements of the society in Hawaii that could not be reached by scientific writing. . One work of fiction which is more recent, is Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore, 2002. . In this fiction, the thirty three years of Christ’s life missing from the Bible is described.  It tells of Joshua (Jesus) and the narrator of the story (Biff), travelling to Asia and coming into contact with various religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. . It sees many of the values preached by Joshua as thus having diffused from the non Solomanic religions of Asia. . While a delightful story in itself, it later becomes apparent that Moore did a lot of research in preparing to write the story. . He looked often, for example at the Gospel of Saint Thomas, which was purged from the bible by the fourth century bishops of Rome because it had ideas in it that, if spread, might reduce their patriarchal power. .

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. Graduating from Cult to Religion: .... Every new religion starts off as a cult, although not every cult graduates to become a religion. . The social organisation of a cult, to be started and to survive and thrive, must be different from what it becomes as an established religion. . Most importantly, the leadership must be organized with different principles. See:  Graduating from Cult to Religion. . A struggling cult, founded perhaps by one person with a vision, maybe soon a few collaborators, and then a few followers, needs a strong charismatic leader to keep it whole and operating. . This may last until the death of the charismatic leader.  Then it has to find another charismatic leader, who may take the cult along very different directions. . As the cult grows and outlasts it members and leaders, it must develop new ways of ensuring continuity of leadership, and charisma may eventually become dysfunctional. . Soon traditions of inheritance become the means of obtaining new leaders or, more likely, the same set of meritocracy and rational succession principles of any surviving bureaucracies. .

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. Beliefs Without Religion: .... It is valuable to look at the myths of the day to have a deeper understanding of the beliefs and cosmology of the people. . In today’s society, growing now for over seventy years, most of our myths have been manufactured in Hollywood. . It is interesting, therefore, to look at recent surveys, including census data, of peoples’ religious beliefs. . A growing number of respondents report that they believe in The Force, as in the Star Wars series. . This is a large following without a formalized congregation, and without the usual bureaucracy (or formal organization) of a religion. . It is our challenge today to explain the rise of those spiritual but non religious beliefs. ––»«––

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