Religious instinct
Religious instinct has been theorized by some scholars as a part of human nature[1][2][3] - support for such a position being found in the fact that (as Talcott Parsons put it) “there is no known human society without something which modern social scientists would classify as religion”.[4]
Theologians however have questioned the utility of an approach to religion by way of a so-called instinct;[5]psychologists have disputed the existence of any such specific instinct;[6] while others would point to the advance of secularization in the modern world as refuting the assumption of a specific religious instinct inevitably leading to the establishment of religion as a fundamental human institution.[7]
Observations
There are no religious rituals observed in animals, including our close relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, although chimps were observed to have sometimes collective excitements for no reason.[8]
Archaeologists have established the existence of burial rituals among Neanderthals some 50,000 years ago:[9] their appearance has sometimes been taken as evidence of the human capacity to transform instinct, rather than to be driven by it.[10]
Freud and Jung
Sigmund Freud saw human weakness and helplessness as a fundamental force behind the establishment of religion[11] - a view which might seem to draw support from the Inglehart-Welzel thesis that links the insecurities of traditional economies to a search for spiritual certainty, the affluence of modernisation to a declining stress on religion.[12]
Carl Jung (1875–1961) theorized the existence of a collective unconscious, as a residue of what has been learned in humankind's evolution and ancestral past, which contains the instinctual potential for creativity as well as the spiritual heritage of mankind,[13] and which unconsciously dictates our behaviour.[14]
While he recognized in man a genetic predisposition to order experience in mythological, religious or symbolic terms,[15] Jung reserved judgement as to what bearing this had for the truth-value of religion.[16]
He never ceased however to stress the important challenge all such factors presented to any shallowly rationalistic world-view.[17]
Criticism
Durkheim saw the social, not the instinctual side of mankind as the key to their religious experience.[18]
See also
References
- ^ John Roberts Dummelow (1920). A commentary on the Holy Bible. Macmillan.
- ^ "The Faith Instinct". Incubator.rockefeller.edu. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
- ^ Carolyn See (December 25, 2009). "Book review: The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade". The Washington Post.
- ^ Introduction, Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1971) p. xxvii
- ^ Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (1996) p. 111-2
- ^ J. B. Pratt, The Religious Consciousness (2004) p. 69
- ^ Peter L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels (1973) p. 13-4
- ^ http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/publications/Alcorta_Sosis,_Signals_and_rituals_of_humans_and_animals.pdf
- ^ Prayer: A History. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2006. ISBN 978-0-618-77360-2.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|authors=ignored (help) - ^ Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (1993) p. 104
- ^ S. Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion (PFL 12) p. 203
- ^ R. F. Foster, Luck of the Irish (2008) p. 66
- ^ Jung and religion.
- ^ Locke, John (2010-10-02). "Jung's Thoughts on God: The Religious Depths of Our Psyches (Jung on the Hudson Book Series) by Donald Dyer - Powell's Books". Powells.com. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
- ^ R. Gregory ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) p. 405
- ^ Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols (1978) p. 75-82
- ^ Jung, p.90-3
- ^ E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1971) p. 418
External links
- Thomas John Hardy (1913). The religious instinct. Longmans, Green, and co.
- "Human instincts, normal and pathological: the religious instinct", Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association, 26-August-2005, Vol 118 No 1221
- The Psychology of Religion, Joseph McCabe
- "The Religious Instinct", Henry Rutgers Marshall, Mind, Vol. 6, No. 21 (Jan., 1897), pp. 40–58
- "Book Review: An Asian Theology of Liberation", Nancy Bowell, Buddhist–Christian Studies, Volume 12., January 1993
- The Function of Religion
- The Psychology of Religion