A Cultist Faith (SG Essays)

[Analytical Essay] Is religion real or fake?

---

Yen Pei appeared quite happy to collaborate with the state authorities. He was a pioneer member and Buddhist representative of the Singapore Presidential Council for Religious Harmony and often invited government ministers to officiate the opening ceremonies of his social welfare organizations.

Broadening Perspectives and Encouraging Independent Thinking…

Rather than engaging in militant confrontation with the government or risk antagonizing the authorities by organizing public demonstrations, Buddhist activists adopted firm but peaceful measures to achieve their objectives. Thus, it appears that Buddhist activists co-opted the state to do its bidding, rather than vice versa. Yen Pei was quick to use Buddhist ideas of compassion, loving-kindness, and the precept of not taking intoxicants as practical solutions to secular social issues, including elderly care, organ donation and transplant, and drug rehabilitation.

At a spiritual level, proponents of Humanistic Buddhism believe that enlightenment can be achieved in this world, and therefore, strive to build a pure land on earth. One of the ways to construct a this-worldly pure land is to be an active citizen in addressing and contributing to contemporary issues. State and Society, , ed. Jason Lim and Terence Lee London: Why are monks in Singapore charging such high fees for a wake chant?

Prices range from a thousand to a few thousand dollars. When recommend by funeral directors, the price is even higher, another thousand. But recently I attended a wake and the family told me this monk charged only dollars. Why the huge difference in price? Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Buddhism and Activism in Burma New York: Innovation and Activism in Contemporary Japan Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ; David P.

According to the Singapore census of population, Buddhism experienced a rapid growth from How do our complex nerves or brain work? What is the meaning of our dreams? Why do we need to sleep and eat daily? Why is human connection so essential for human beings? How can we also develop and become so complex in terms of science, morality, reasoning, systematic structures, inventions and philosophies?

There are many things we cannot explain in this world, as much as there are many reasons not to believe in a concept of God. God does provides a sense of meaning, purpose and hope to living beings. Some of us may have positive or negative life experiences which leads us closer or drift us apart from God and Religion. Will I suffer or will I go to heaven? Why is my life faced with so many issues? I think there is this is double-edged sword aspect to religion. It provides people a sense of hope that things will get better, that there is more to life than just living, that we will all end up in a better place, everything happens for a reason and that God always loves us.

It gives people a sense of love, trust, stability and security to our life issues and experiences, alongside a close, personal relationship with God. Many conflicts or tensions in the world or society are a result of religious intolerance. If I were an atheist my subjective thought , I would wonder and question about how the galaxy structure was made or the entire universe even came about.

Can there be an explanation, hope or a future in regards to life without the presence of a religion? You are commenting using your WordPress.

Derniers numéros

You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. The real challenge would have been to combine both perspectives in a dialectical, mutually reinforcing fashion.

Just as the synchronic perspective is at the heart of cultural analysis, it needs to be in direct communication with the diachronic perspective, since it reveals the very processes which shape and are shaped by it. To achieve such an active oscillation between the two perspectives, however, would have required Parker to establish more explicit links between the material presented in both volumes by giving up the two-volume structure in favour of a more dialectical account of continuity and change. The arbitrariness with which much of the material is distributed between the two books reveals how artificial and foreign the two-volume structure adopted is to the data discussed.

As a result, Parker is ultimately unable to connect structure with agency — despite the detail and analytical rigor that distinguish his work. It was Wilamowitz who wrote Der Glaube der Hellenen. Against this background it is curious that he makes so strict a distinction between religious beliefs and practices. In the statement quoted above, religious belief is divorced from religious practice and becomes a product of modern rather than ancient imagination.

While this might have been true for the earlier unreflected theology of Harrison, Cornford or Murray, it is certainly less correct for the reconstruction of Greek religious beliefs and practices that carefully reflects on its own premises. Belief and practice may in theory be separate; but they may also be causally related. Belief informs practice just as much as practice informs belief. These include, but are not limited to, Greek notions about the gods and their reciprocal relationship with humanity and Greek ideas about sacrificial purity and the special status of blood.

Other socio-political units besides the polis, such as the ethne , were seen as remnants in a larger evolutionary scheme that culminated in the polis. The critical discussion of his work induced de Polignac himself to give up strictly bipolar synchronicity in favour of a more chronologically and geographically nuanced picture.

The role of sanctuaries and festivals in archaic Greece cannot be analyzed either by isolating one element, or be general categorizations determined by rigid and constant parameters… It should rather be seen as a system in which the meaning of each element is determined by complex interactions with other components, combing long-lasting religious conceptions and rapid shifts in cult practices and organization.

Bestselling Series

Sanctuaries are certainly among the places where the extraordinary vitality and inventiveness of archaic Greece are at their most visible. The prevailing view now seems to be that the polis did not so much replace older identities as offer an alternative model, which continued to co-exist with other forms of identity and organization.

This change of focus enables a more differentiated perspective, which takes into account alternative worshipping communities that continued to exist besides the polis during the Iron Age, the Archaic and later periods. Drawing in particular on material remains from the margins of the emerging polis-world Thessaly, Phokis, East Lokris, Achaia and Arcadia , Morgan revises widespread notions in scholarship that were primarily based on the cases of large and central poleis, such as Athens, Sparta and Argos which were atypical in many ways.

Before the creation of the polis, however, cult practice would have been either a matter of private initiative of an individual or a household, or that of a kinship group. At the same time Greek religion remained a vehicle for the communication of other, larger identities, most notably that of ethnic identity.

Top Authors

An inscription dating from around BC, for example, testifies the transfer of a sanctuary with an important festival from the city of Anactorium in North-western Greece to the Acarnanian league. These leagues of several poleis such as the Panionian amphictiony which looked after a common Poseidon sanctuary located on the semi-island of Mycale provide another example of Greek religious structures situated beyond the polis. For a religion that lacked the organizational structures characteristic of most modern religions, such as a church, a creed and a dogma, it offers an alternative concept of religious administration and signification.

To start with, the model of polis religion in some forms and formulations renders Greek religion less comprehensible than it ought to be. There is, for example, a certain conceptual vagueness in works based on the polis model concerning the nature of the embeddedness of Greek religion in the polis. The exact quality of the relationship between religious structures and socio-political structures remains under-theorized in many works based on the model.

One result of this is that scholarly accounts oscillate between the depiction of religion as a mainly passive force within society mapping onto the reach of polis institutions to the depiction of a more active role of religion at the other. Both perspectives, however, assume that the structured systematic character of Greek religion ran parallel to the political and social structures of the polis.

This assumption frequently results in a focus on synchronic coherence and consistency. While the polis model is able to explain the official response to religious activity it does not necessarily provide a key to understanding the appeal of this activity from the point of view of those involved in it. Religion and Power in the Ancient World , Ithaca, Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun , Oxford, Bruit Zaidman , L.

Cartledge, Cambridge, French orig. La Religion grecque , Paris, Interpretation altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen , Berlin, Engl. Raffan, Oxford, German orig. The Contexts of Mythology , Cambridge, Chicago, , a third volume is in production. Ancient Greek Magic and Religion , Oxford, Fustel de Coulanges , N.

The Politics of Athenian Religion , Ithaca, A ntes , A. Essays in Greek Literature and Culture , Oxford, , p. Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets , London, A Study of the Orphic Movement , London, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Sources for the Ancient Greek Polis , Stuttgart, , p. Rosenmeyer , Atlanta, , p. Athenians Ideas about Citizenship and the Division of the Sexes , transl. Princeton, French orig.

On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens , transl. Fort, New York, French orig. Mazarakis Ainian , A. June , Stockholm, , p.

Navigation

Studies in Hellenistic History , Sheffield, Essays on the Politics of Going on Together , Princeton, , p. Dodona, Olympia, Ammon , Oxford, A History , Oxford, Lloyd, Chicago, French orig. Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen , Freiburg, Engl. Schmitt Pantel , P. New Approaches , London, , p. Studies in the History of Religions , Chicago, Studies in the Hellenistic Process , Copenhagen, Text and Images, Rituals and Myths , Oxford, To the End of the Classical Period , Oxford, Formen zwischenstaatlicher Beziehungen im archaischen Griechenland , Stuttgart,

• Pharmacy Practice (Integrated Foundations Of Pharmacy)
• El crimen de lord Arthur Saville ( Traduccion Reciente ) (Spanish Edition)
• Euro-Bonds, Europäischer Währungsfonds oder ein neuer institutioneller Rahmen für den Euro-Raum? (German Edition)
• The Great Unraveling: Prepper Survival Fiction (A Preppers Perspective Book 1)
• Miscarriage of Justice: A Novel