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Higher consciousness in the western traditions
Thinking about Religion (in the West)Wittgenstein reckoned religious discourse to be a way of using language which neither has nor needs any justification outside of itself. Whitehead reckoned that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitude". There are, however, other ways of thinking about religion.
The late 19th and early 20th century Anthropologists were searching for the historical origins of religion and tended towards a tripartite, quasi-evolutionary progression from animism through polytheism to monotheism. Modern anthropologists tend to focus on the meaning and function of the religious symbols, myths and rituals in specific cultural contexts. Durkheim, within Sociology, defined religion in terms of its social function of binding people together. Tillich, following Weber, however, saw religion as a means of answering the human existential dilemmas surrounding the uncertainties of birth, sickness and death. Modern sociologists are concerned with the process called "secularization". In the late 19th century Psychologists were interested in the "religious experience" as it manifested in conversion, prayer, mysticism and altered states of consciousness etc. Then came Freud who saw religion as illusion and Jung who was interested in the symbols of dream, fantasy and myth. Modern psychologists approach religion via existentialism and phenomenology. Theologies are of two main types - revealed and natural, with only the latter being accessible to human reason. A theological treatise provides (a) a systematic expression of beliefs, (b) an account of their sources and authority, and (c) a clarification of their relation to other areas of belief. The Philosophy of religion is concerned to analyse the special roles played, and the special problems raised, by the characteristic concepts and doctrines of religion within the whole structure and economy of human thought. Phenomenology is the study of "that which appears". It is rooted in the philosophy of Brentano and Husserl and, as a methodology, has spread through most areas of recent thought. The more recent phenomenologists of religion have developed methods (or the art) of entering into the meaning which religious actions and ideas have for those who perform or hold them. They claim to describe the contextual "meaning" of phenomena and thus to avoid problems arising from the naturalistic reductionism of the sciences and the preordinate evaluations of theology.
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