SOCA03Y3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13.1: Edward Burnett Tylor, Polytheism, Animism
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Religion: defined as a set of organized beliefs about the supernatural or spiritual worlds and their associated ceremonies that guides people"s behaviour and joins them into communities of believers. Faith: a belief system based on conviction that does not require objective evidence to substantiate its claims (e. g. , a person can have faith that god exists without first-hand evidence to support the claim) By investigating religion as an important social institution, sociologists continue their tradition of looking at the individual"s relationship to the social -> the central focus of the sociological endeavour. Tylor saw that just as cultures naturally evolve from simple, primitive communities to modern, complex states over time, so, too, do religions. He argued that religion evolved through distinct stages. In which supernatural beings or spirits are believed to inhabit both living things (plants, animals, people) and inanimate objects (mountains, rivers) In other words, within every substance there is a separate entity or being.
