Abstract
There are some preliminaries that need to be addressed. We think we know what religion is and what religions are at first consideration. There is Christianity, with its Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox varieties. There is Judaism, which now comes in the flavors of Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox, as well as its Ashkenazi and Sephardic ethnic variations. There is Islam, which comes in the form of Sunni, Shiite, and Sufi, the latter being a somewhat mixed category. There is Hinduism, which comes with a huge pantheon of gods, philosophies, and practices—too many to list. Buddhism, on the other hand, is neatly divided into two streams—Theravada and Mahayana—although this turns out to be quite misleading. In China, we find a synchronistic mix of Taoism and Confucianism, which also picked up a lot of Buddhism along the way. To this survey, we might add a few smaller but significant sects, including Sikhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism from South Asia, as well as innumerable primal religions from surviving indigenous peoples all around the world. Shintoism in Japan and other ancestor-worship cults might be best understood as surviving primal religions. The absence of Baha’i from this list will disturb some, but then I did not include Yoruba religions either. This is the basic typology of the standard “Introduction to World Religions” course offered to undergraduates at colleges and universities all over the United States.
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Notes
Another source puts the number of distinct religions in the world at ten thousand, of which 150 have 1 million or more members. These statistics are put together to support Christian missionaries in David Barrett, George Kurian, and Todd Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The authors count some 33,830 denominations within Christianity.
Anthony F. C. Wallace, Revitalizations and Mazeways: Essays on Culture Change, ed. Robert S. Grumet, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
Daniel L. Overmyer, “Chinese Religion: An Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2005).
See, for instance, Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004);
Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006);
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003);
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Books, 2007). For a thoughtful rebuttal, see John Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2008).
For a thoughtful rebuttal, see John Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2008).
Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958);
Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961);
Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971);
Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty, vol. 2 (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976).
For critics of Eliade, see G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973);
For critics of Eliade, see G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974);
Guilford Dudley III, Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade & His Critics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1938] 1966);
The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campell (New York: Penguin, 1971).
George Santayana, Life of Reason, vol. 3, Reason in Religion (New York: Prometheus Books, [1905–06] 1998).
John Bowker, The Sense of God (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, [1973] 1995), x.
Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Stanley H. Ambrose, “Late Pleistocene Human Population Bottlenecks, Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 34, no. 6 (1998); Ambrose, “Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans,” Bradshaw Foundation, http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanley_ambrose.php. Accessed June 12, 2009.
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© 2010 William Grassie
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Grassie, W. (2010). The Challenge of Comparative Religion. In: The New Sciences of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114746_2
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