Question

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Outline the different theories that have been put forward to explain the origin of religion and give a short evaluation of each. Specifically, compare and contrast the views of scholars with the approach of Huston Smith. How are they similar or different in answering the basic questions and problems of humanity? (3 paragraphs)

Answer 1

The theories of origin were given by different scholars like Immanuel Kant , Max Muller , James George Frazer , Marx and freud .
To Immanuel Kant, an 18th century German philosopher, religion is the product of limited empirical reason. In other words, since there are things that are unexplainable by simply using the five senses, humans developed religion to fill in the blanks. To Kant, religious beliefs are unprovable. Therefore, people are not religious due to their power of reason or their cognitive minds. On the contrary, religion is an act of the moral will. People will themselves to believe in religion - it is not a product of reason.
Different from Kant, the 19th century Max Muller held to the nature-worship theory. This theory puts forth the idea that religion developed as primitive people groups observed nature. As they observed the sun, moon, winds and rains, they began to personify them, sort of like our modern-day use of the term 'Mother Nature.' According to Muller, this personification led to worship among the primitive people. As cultures grew, this worship became more structured. For example, there was Greece's Poseidon, god of the sea, or Babylon's Marduk, who controlled the winds. Muller's nature-worship theory is closely tied to animism. In animism, all of nature is full of unseen spirits, which are to be worshipped. Practicing animism, the native cultures of the Americas believed that nature, from rocks, to trees, to water, had a spirit known as Anima. This spirit allowed them to feel and communicate with humans and each other.
Religion to James George Frazer meant the “propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life”. Religion therefore consisted of two parts: the theoretical (belief in higher powers) and the practical (man needs to please these higher powers). The belief aspect has to come first because you need to believe in a divine being before you can attempt to please it. “If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious; if the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good”.
Religion, Freud believed, was an expression of underlying psychological neuroses and distress. At various points in his writings, he suggested that religion was an attempt to control the Oedipal complex (as opposed to the Electra complex), a means of giving structure to social groups, wish fulfillment, an infantile delusion, and an attempt to control the outside world. Among some of Freud's most famous quotes on religion, he suggested that, "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." Sigmund Freud in his book "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1933).
Renowned world religions scholar Huston Smith says, “Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.” For Smith, a practicing Methodist who for 26 years has prayed five times a day in Arabic and who, at 78, still does hatha yoga, that line can be drawn creatively or idiosyncratically — but it must always be done with discipline. Prior to Huston Smith, the modern mind's view of religion was that it was a waste of time or worse. Freud had said that religion is a delusion we create to comfort ourselves in an uncertain world. We, based on an "infantile model," project a cosmic father or mother onto an indifferent universe so that we can have someone to plead to for help when matters get beyond our control. Marx, to cite another modernist disparager of religion, argued even earlier that "religion is the opiate of the masses," a drug fed to us by our oppressors to keep us in check, distracting us from launching the revolutions that would bring social equality and justice, by feeding us pretty lies that placate us in our misery. In short, by the 1950s, the job of most professors of religion, in most colleges, was largely to explain religion away, as something quaint and outdated, something we'd be better off without. It was the fifties after all, and high time we outgrew our non-scientific ways of making sense of the world. But Huston changed all that. He described the religions as their believers understood them, avoiding evaluation or judgment almost entirely. Hutson Smith is even known as the man who took religion seriously.

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