REL 2000 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Polytheism, Psychoanalysis, Reductionism
Document Summary
Sense that it"s real, but you can"t see it. It is incredibly hard to determine what religion really is even though we seem to when talking about it. The holy (otto: religion is an emotional response to how we feel about the holy b. Reductionism leads to studying something else: society (durkheim, creating social cohesion, psychology (freud) Move away from theology towards rationality: religionswissenschaft (religion-science) The start of studying religion without believing in it or practicing it. Belief in universal human nature/reason: religion became universal. Problem starting to include other things into category. Still not a perfect definition: still too broad (ethical absolutism, doesn"t allow for religion as sui generis ( of its own kind ) A strong academic category doesn"t require privileged information: academic approaches cant include non-human origins. Iii: doesn"t mean they do not exist. If religion is not an independent study, then we shouldn"t try to define it as such a.
