keyed to Gary Kessler, Studying Religion through Cases

1. Ritual Symbol Myth
Unit 2 – Sacred Power

2. Ultimate Reality
Truth
 Language of Philosophy
 Elite
 Textual
 Thinking not feeling
 How do we know that what
we know is true?
 Humans can reason and
therefore know
Power
 Language of Religion
 Popular
 Experiential
 Feeling not thinking
 How do we know that what
we feel is real?
 Sacred power reveals itself
to humans so they can
know

3. The Dao
 The Nameless
 Beyond human reason
 Infinite and boundless
 “The Way” of Nature
 Yin and Yang
 Potentiality without Being
 Humans should live in
harmony with the Dao. A
path of no-action

4. GOD
 “God” is a Being than
which nothing greater can
be conceived.
 Reason alone proves that
GOD exists
 GOD is the Ultimate Reality
 One need not experience
this GOD to prove GOD
exists.
 Revelation and Reason
lead to the same
conclusion

5. Important theisms
 Monotheism: belief that only one god exists
 Polytheism: belief that multiple gods exist
 Pantheism: belief that everything is god
 Panentheism: belief that everything exists IN god.
 Monism: Belief that everything emanates from the
One god.
 Henotheism: belief that multiple gods exist but only
one (at a time) is worshiped
 Atheism: belief that no god exists

6. Beliefs about god/s
 Theism means “belief in the existence of god/s”. In
antiquity, the Greek word “theoi” referred to the
panoply of Greek gods/goddesses. The singular form
theos is the same word that Greek scriptures use to
refer to the God of the Christian Bible. When scholars
began to study religion “scientifically” in the 19th
century, religion was pretty much another word for
the Christian belief in God. Not all ideas of sacred
power should be equated with a belief in god/s.
 When scholars began to study other religions with
different conceptions of sacred beings and power,
new words were created to describe these ideas:
Polytheism, henotheism, pantheism, atheism, etc.
Christians referred to their belief in one God as
“monotheism”. Judaism and Islam were also
categorized as monotheistic religions.

7. Manifestations of
sacred power
If the ultimate reality of most
religious philosophies
transcends the physical
world, or is beyond human
reason or reach, who are
these gods, goddesses, kami,
ancestral spirits, totems, etc.
that people worship, pray to,
placate, love and fear?

8. E B Tylor,
Anthropologist
(1832-1917)
Tylor defined religion as “the
belief in spirits” or ANIMISM. He
was a rationalist who believed
that human beings came up
with the idea of spirits to
explain why dead people still
appeared to them in dreams.
An evolutionist, he argued that
“primitive” thinking would
eventually give way to science
and religion would disappear.

9. Emile Durkheim,
Sociologist (1857-
1917)
Durkheim studied aborignal
societies in a quest to discover the
origin of religious beliefs. TOTEMISM
was the term he used to describe
the way people divided reality into
two categories: the accessible and
ordinary (profane) and the special
and taboo (sacred). Durkheim
argued that the special power
people attributed to the sacred
was another way of describing the
force that held their society
together It was a power human
beings generated, not something
superhuman.

10. Sacred Power
 A basic religious category or characteristic
 By comparison ordinary power is “profane”
 Sacred power is ambivalent and unpredictable
 The human encounter with sacred power is the
basic building block for most religion(s).
 Religious people claim to experience this power
in an endless array of forms
 Early scientists tried to explain human belief in
supernatural beings or sacred power.

11. Manifestations of
the Sacred
 Almost anything can be a symbol or
manifestation of Sacred Power.
 Ancestral spirits testify to the limitations of
physical death in many religious cultures
 Gods can be part of nature or they can
demonstrate power over nature.
 Gods can incarnate (become human), or
appear in the material world as avatars,
monstrous beings, angels, unusual objects, or
animals, or their power can become visible and
active even as they remain invisible.

12. Daoism and Christianity
Three purities of
Daoism
Three persons of the
Christian Godhead

13. Similar but Different
The Three Purities
 The Dao produced “One”
 “One” produced “Two”
 “Two” produced “Three”
 “Three produced All things
 Each of the purities
represents a god or “deity”
and a heavenly location.
 Each deity is a form of “chi”
or the ubiquitous energy of
creation and of created
things.
The Catholic Trinity
 The Father generates
 The Son is begotten
 The Spirit proceeds
 The Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit are uncreated and
indivisible. They share one
divine essence.
 All things were created by
the Father, through the Son
by the Power of the Holy
Spirit.

14. Hindu Trimurti
 The Hindu Trimurti comprises
the three main forms or
manifestations of Brahman,
the Ultimate Sacred Power in
the Hindu universe: Brahma,
Vishnu, and Shiva
 Brahma creates
 Vishnu sustains and
 Shiva destroys.
 Although Brahma is the
creator, his role is less
significant than Vishnu (and
his 10 avatars) and Shiva.

15. Immortals
The flow of sacred power
between the created and
uncreated realms is a two-way
affair. In Daoism, human
beings who have mastered the
mysterious ways of the Dao
may ascend to immortality, like
Marshal Wen whose selfless act
of heroism saved a town from
death by poisoned water. He is
worshiped as one of many
gods in the Daoist pantheon.

16. Incarnation
In the idea of incarnation,
deity takes on human flesh,
descending from the
uncreated realm to the
created realm for the sake of
humanity. The Christian Jesus,
a divine-human being, is the
paradigmatic example of
incarnation.

17. Avatars
Avatars are also incarnations of
sacred power. The term is most
often used when referring to the
ten animal or human forms that the
Hindu deity, Vishnu, has taken
when it has been necessary to
intervene for the good of dharma
on earth: the fish, the tortoise, the
boar, the human-lion, the dwarf,
the angry man, Lord Rama, Lord
Krishna, Balarama (Buddha), Kalki.
A final Avatar is yet to appear.

18. Shiva
 Shiva is one of the three
forms of Brahman, Hindus’
Ultimate Reality or Sacred
Power. Here Shiva is depicted
wreathed with snakes, which
may “represent the
evolutionary power within the
human body, the spiritual
power which may be
developed through yoga,
and also Shiva’s power to
deal with death”
(http://www.strath.ac.uk/red
b/notes/hinduism/shiva/)
 Ganesha, the elephant-
headed god of Hindu
mythology, is one of Shiva’s
sons.

19. Humans and Sacred Power
 Avatars, Incarnations, gods and goddesses,
ancestral spirits, totems, angles, demons and
ghosts … all make the Ultimate Reality of the
religious universe present in some way in the
mundane, profane world of the ordinary human
being.
 Sacred power is heady stuff, whether marked off
by taboos or experienced through trance states
and spirit possession.
 Theological truths may nurture the religious
thinker but sacred power is the experience of a
lifetime for the religious believer.

20. “You can have as much of
God as you want.”
Them seminary preachers don’t understand that. They don’t understand the spirit of the Lord. They’re
taught by man. The know the forms of godliness, but they deny the power” (Covington, Salvation on
Sand Mountain, p. 64).

21. Image Sources
 http://0.tqn.com/d/taoism/1/0/M/0/-/-/Laozi_large.jpg
 http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9781448936892_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG
 http://sattvayoga.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Godgoddess-pic.jpg
 http://mythology2051.tripod.com/EB_Tylor.jpg
 http://www.wisdomportal.com/Evil/Durkheim%28410x560%29.jpg
 http://www.wpclipart.com/religion_mythology/chinese/Taoist_Triad.png
 http://pladelafont.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html
 http://www.strath.ac.uk/media/faculties/hass/re/pictures/artefacts/hindu/Trimurti-98x108.jpg
 http://www.strath.ac.uk/media/faculties/hass/re/pictures/artefacts/hindu/Shiva01-74x100.jpg
 http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln472/Images472/MarshalWen.jpg
 http://hopebeyondreason.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/can-a-divine-jesus-have-false-beliefs/
 http://gita-blog.blogspot.com/2009/04/previous-births-of-lord-krishna.html
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/snake-handling-a-fading-
tradition/2011/11/09/gIQASbXw8M_gallery.html#photo=9