10 Comparative Religion
Chapter 10 audio be accessed on Soundcloud. Instructor resources are available on Canvas Commons.
Chapter 10 Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to:
- Compare and contrast the beliefs of the world’s major religions.
- Connect modern religious beliefs with historical and political changes throughout human history.
- Distinguish the terms “religion” and “cult” and critique widespread uses of the “cult” concept.
10.1 Cross-cultural Examination of Religion
A tool that anthropologists use to closely examine cultural adaptations, cultural evolution, and the migration of culture, is the cross-cultural approach. The cross-cultural approach compares more than one cultural belief, tradition, or practice in order to identify differences and similarities that exist across groups. As we have seen in this course, anthropologists place no more importance on the major religions of the world today than we do on the ones practiced by small or isolated or even ancient groups. Because we set out to document and understand religious variation among humans, it only makes sense that we would want to examine the full range of that variation, not just a few of the most widespread examples. However, we also recognize that there is some value to singling out the major world religions in order to identify traits they have in common while similarly recognizing the major differences that arose due to environmental factors, historical events, etc. The following chapter will compare and contrast the beliefs, myths, and traditions of the world’s major religions in an attempt to offer a holistic picture of the world’s dominating belief systems.
Throughout this chapter it’s important to be able to separate your own, particularly religious beliefs from the chapter content and to look at religions objectively. Do not apply your own, culturally-specific idea of ultimate “truth” to the other religious belief systems that we will examine here; strive to think like an anthropologist and employ cultural relativism.
10.2 Religions Change Over Time
In “The Essentials of Hinduism,” Swami Bhaskarananda writes,
“Any ancient religion can be compared to the attic of an old home. Unless the attic is regularly cleaned, it gathers dust and cobwebs and eventually becomes unusable. Similarly, if a religion cannot be updated or cleaned from time to time, it loses its usefulness and cannot relate anymore to changed times and people.”
Here, Swami Bhaskarananda is making an important point: religions must adapt to changing times, environments, political events, and social contexts in order to remain relevant in the minds of adherents. This is precisely what we will examine together throughout this chapter. In the case of each major world religion, we will examine the cultural events that shaped the religion as we know it today and we will identify the cultural context that allows the religion to maintain relevance.
Remember that anthropologists embrace