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The essence of religion, Durkheim finds, is the concept of the sacred, the only phenomenon which unites all religions. "A religion," writes Durkheim, "is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into a single moral community called a ...
Evolution, according to this view, is simply a tool that God employed to develop human life. According to the American Scientific Affiliation , a Christian organization of scientists: A theory of theistic evolution (TE) — also called evolutionary creation — proposes that God's method of creation was to cleverly design a universe in which ...
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology.This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods (surveys, polls, demographic and census analysis) and of qualitative approaches (such as participant observation, interviewing, and analysis of archival ...
Homo duplex is a view promulgated by Émile Durkheim, a macro-sociologist of the 19th century, saying that a man on the one hand is a biological organism, driven by instincts, with desire and appetite and on the other hand is being led by morality and other elements generated by society. What allows a person to go beyond the "animal" nature is ...
Durkheim also argued that our primary categories for understanding the world have their origins in religion. [55] It is religion, Durkheim writes, that gave rise to most if not all other social constructs, including the larger society. [82] Durkheim argued that categories are produced by the society, and thus are collective creations. [38]
either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage; or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, saw religion as an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words: religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.
He viewed it as a concrete idea that affected a person's everyday life. [3] Durkheim's examples of social facts included social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization, and all societal institutions we must account for in everyday interactions with other members of our societies.
Douglas and Durkheim both rejected the idea that concepts of purity and impurity, such as those found in Leviticus, were an attempt to use religion to explain hygiene, an otherwise impossible task in the scientific terms of the time, several millennium before the concept of germs. Instead, according to Douglas and Durkheim, spiritual ...