So blasphemy can kill off deities, and the measure of its success is that it comes not to be blasphemous at all. But there is another threat to organised and literate religions, which they certainly treat as potentially fatal. That's heresy: wrong belief and a misapplication of the sacred. In this context one of the most interesting texts is CS Lewis's denunciation of female priests.
They would, he said, constitute a new religion. Yet, when they came, we can see that they appeared as a simple inevitable, development of the old one. They are still priests.
And it is this fact which illustrates better than anything the living and evolutionary nature of religions of all sorts. There could no more be a first Christian than there could be a first homo sapiens. We can see religions have been born, and have died, but the moments of birth and death will always be mysterious and shrouded.
How to believe Religion. This article is more than 8 years old. Andrew Brown. Do they waste away, or get conquered by something better? Religion under attack: Hernan Cortez with Spaniards and 5, Indians defeats a larger Aztec force in Another study 8 , taking a cross-cultural perspective on the near death experience phenomena, indicates that although there are common themes, there are also reported differences.
Considering the studies we have just described, although it does seem that the central features of near death experiences have been recorded throughout history and across numerous cultures, the actual interpretation of what people claim to have observed, of the experience they claim to have lived through, may reflect personal religious or cultural views. In other words, during a close encounter with death, people from different parts of the world may feel peaceful, see a tunnel, a bright light and a being of light, and have a sensation of detaching from their bodies, but they may identify the being of light according to their own cultural and religious backgrounds.
For example, an atheist with a NDE may simply believe they had experienced a hallucination, while someone who believes in Jesus may believe they had met Christ.
If you are interested to know more, we encourage you to visit the Near Death Experiences Section 9 of our web site where you will find many more exciting articles. Mental Dis. Search for:. Join our e-newsletter. Near Death Experiences. Print PDF. The most common features are: a Having an out of body experience; b A reunion with ancestors and departed friends; c An experience of light accompanied by joy and peace; d A border or dividing line between the living and the dead.
Studies on the influence of socio-cultural factors on near death experiences and death bed visions In one study carried out in , the experiences of 16 Asian Indians had been compared with those of Americans and it had been found that the Indians had often encountered Yamraj, the Hindu king of the dead, while the Americans had not.
They certainly don't understand it theologically. There is a good attack on these kinds of misunderstandings in Pascal Boyer's book The Naturalness of Religious Ideas , in which he points out that most anthropological accounts of "primitive beliefs" refer to something that does not actually exist: "They [are not] thoughts that occur to actual people; they describe thoughts that people might entertain, in the anthropologist's view, if they wanted to make sense of what they actually do and say.
Bellah, with his stress on ritual and on the embodiment of beliefs in wider systems of meaning, avoids this pitfall. You make sense of what you do and say by acting on it, and embodying it in a larger narrative, not by extracting it into a system. Yet systems do emerge, and they form a large part of what we now think of as religion. Although some form of healing ritual, and healing specialist, seems to have been among the very earliest precursors of religion, and of priesthood, the emergence of any kind of "religion" organisationally distinct from the rest of culture depends at the very least on agriculture, which provides enough of a surplus in fixed settlements.
It seems certain that religions, like other social forms, evolve: that is to say they arise from modifications of earlier forms. The trouble for historical inquiry is simply that without written records we simply have to guess what happened.
With written records, we need no longer guess, but can be authoritatively misled. Two excellent accounts of this process are Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword , about the invention of Islam, and Jim Macdonald's blogpost on the emergence of the Bible as fan fiction.
In those religious systems we know about, there seem to be two processes under way. The first is a kind of coalescence of folk beliefs and practices into something more or less organised and more or less useful to the state. Shinto looks like that, and Hinduism.
You could make a case that American Protestantism, which has increasingly less to do with historic, Orthodox Christianity, is heading in the other direction.
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