Q: “‘A religious phenomena,’ [Eliade] insists,
will only be recognized as such if it grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it studied ad something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art, or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred.
Pals, Daniel L. Eight Theories of Religion. 2nd Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
C:
In this section, the author quotes Eliade directly. Eliade is unique from other religion scholars, in that he did not reduce religion to the factors that influence it—he did not claim that religion is sheerly a matter of economics or politics, but rather something that exists in tandem with these multiple forces.
This perspective also does not reject the feeling of the practitioner; it does not imply that the religious in this world are merely tricked into finding religion because of, say, their social stance. Eliade accounts for authentic experiences and the true intentions of the practitioner, and more importantly believes that these feelings are true. He is not caught up in whether the objective truth of a religion is true, but rather how the subjective truth one finds from said religion is authentically true to that individual.
No comments:
Post a Comment