RELI 1710 Lecture Notes - Sui Generis, Easter Bunny, Hand History
26 Feb 2014
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The hardest part of the discipline is to define to everyone"s approval what it is. George frazer ( the golden bow , social anthropologist): religion helps people explain things that they would not otherwise be able to explain (ex. Primitive animism (sp): the sea storm is the god, not god being angry. Sigmund freud (psych): religion exists because people are weak; it is the result of psychological distress; neurological distress. Emile durkheim (sociologist): god is society writ large ; religion was the cement of society. God is a projection of the social structures of the real world projected into the heavens. Very irenic (warm and fuzzy around the edges). Karl marx (political philosopher): religion is a tool used to fool the poor and oppressed. alienates the person from the moral value. If they didn"t have itneed religion to be good . Keep poor poor, and elite priests, and rich. Keeps the poor from rebelling, because heaven will reward you.
