Beliefs Flashcards
(22 cards)
What is Vicarous religion?
This is when the active minority practice religion on behalf of the great majority, who thus experience religion secondhand.
What does churches being seen as a Spiritual health service suggest?
It suggests that churches are there for everyone to use whenever they need to.
Why is there less religion nowadays?
The religion that used to be handed down from generation to generation is largely lost because few parents teach their children about religion.
What is individual consumerism?
It’s when individuals make choices themselves about what religious things to consume, such as meditation, prayer, reading the Bible, and reading the Quran.
What is hegemony?
Explains how the ruling class holds the ideological and moral leadership of society, using ideas and values to prevent revolution by winning the consent of the subordinate classes to its rule. The ruling class is able to do this by controlling the institutions that produce ideas, such as religion, the education system and so on.
What does disenchantment of the world mean? sociologist
Squeezing out magical, supernatural ways of thinking and starting a more rational way of thinking.Weber.
What is structural differentiation?
This is when certain roles certain institutions carried out by themeselevs prior to industrial society are given to other institutions, which enables them to specialise in their role.
What does disengagement mean? in the context of religion
This is when religious institutions such as the church are disconnected with society due to many of their roles being taken over by other institutions such as the state.
What does privatisation mean? in the context of religion
This is when religion is now confined to something private such as the family and the home.
Explain Max Weber substantive religion.
Max Weber (1905) Defines religion as belief in a superior or supernatural power that is above nature cannot be explained scientifically. Substantive definitions are exclusive- They draw a clear line between religious and non-religious beliefs. To be a religion, a set of beliefs must include or the supernatural.
Calvanists and Capitalism.
Weber argues that the religious beliefs of Calvinism led to the rise of capitalism in northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Important to note that Weber was arguing that Calvinism is one of the causes not the only one.
Crockett.
Crockett (1998) Estimates that in 1851 40 percent of the adult population of Britain attended church on Sunday. He used evidence from the census of religious worship of the same year.
What did Bruce add?
Adds that if people are not willing to invest time in going to church, this just reflects the declining strength of their beliefs. When people no longer believe they no longer wish to belong, and so their involvement in religion diminishes.
What does Aldridge note?
Notes that, no text speaks for itself; it has to be interpreted, so in reality what fundamentalists hold to be true is not the text itself, but their interpretation of it.
What did Ernest Troeltsch distguish between?
He distinguished between two main types of religious organisation – the church and the sect. Churches are large organisations, often with millions of members such as the catholic church, run by a bureaucratic hierarchy. They claim a monopoly of truth and are universalistic.
By contrast, Troeltsch sees sects as small exclusive groups. Unlike churches, sects are hostile to wider society and expect a high level of commitment, often led by a charismatic leader rather than a hierarchy.
What does Karl Popper believe?
Sir Karl Popper (1959) According to Popper, science is an ‘open’ belief system where every scientist’s theories are open to scrutiny, criticism and testing by others. Science is governed by the principle of falsificationism. That is, scientists set out to try and falsify existing theories, deliberately seeking evidence that would disprove them. If the evidence from an experiment or observation contradicts a theory and shows it to be false, the theory can be discarded and the search for a better explanation can begin. In science, knowledge-claims live or die by the evidence.
What does Karl Kautsky argue?
Argues that weber overestimates the role of ideas and underestimates the economic factor in the origins of capitalism.
What does Bruce argue? (technological worldview)
Argues that the growth of a technological worldview has largely replaced religious or supernatural explanations of why things happen. For example, when a plane crashes with the loss of many lives we are more likely to look for scientific and technological explanations.
Why are they heavily critical of secularisation theory? Stark and Bainbridge
Stark and Bainbridge (1986) Heavily critical of secularisation theory, which they see as Eurocentric – it focuses on the decline of religion in Europe and fails to explain the continuing vitality in America and elsewhere. In their view it also puts forward a distorted view of the past and future. They argue that there was no ‘golden age’ of religion in the past, as they claim secularisation theory implies, nor is it realistic to predict a future end-point for religion when everyone will be an atheist.
Instead they propose religious market theory. This theory is based on two assumptions:
1. People are naturally religious and religion meets human needs
2. It is human nature to seek rewards and avoid costs.
Who does Ann Oakley disagree with
Young and Willmott.
What did Phillipe Aries argue?
Philippe Ariès (1960)
argues that in the Middle Ages (from about the 10th to the 13th centuries), ‘the idea of childhood did not exist’. Children were not seen as having a different ‘nature’ or needs from adults - at least not once they had passed the stage of physical dependency during infancy.
