I feel like I have had a generally broad exposure to religion because, until now, I have attended religious schools my entire life. Those schools were even three different religions: one Jewish, one Presbyterian, and one Catholic. Furthermore, my Catholic high school was very liberal in terms of diversity and exposure to different religions. Every year, for example, the school directed a “diversity week” in which speakers from different cultures and religions visited each day. During that week and throughout the year I attended many (often required) interfaith dialogues between religions like Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. During one class of my four years of required theology classes, I also learned about different religions like Mormonism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. I now see that my predominant exposure to religion, however, has been very one sided since the main focus has been on the Abrahamic tradition.
Even so, I was very surprised at how terribly I did on the “Religious Literacy” test. Even more shocking was that even after four years of constant exposure to Catholicism I could not recall the seven Catholic sacraments on the spot. I almost felt ashamed that I was not an expert on “the ancient stories that continue to motivate the beliefs and behaviors of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population” (Prothero 279). Stephen Prothero’s opinion on the need for knowledge of religion definitely captures the inherent and inseparable link between culture and religion. Knowledge is power and ignorance is a major weakness which can lead to unnecessary conflict.
On the note of understanding different religions, I also think that the way people gain their understanding of religion can drastically affect how they view it. Of course learning about a religion from media, as in after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, can skew perspectives. But I think that even growing up in a religion verses learning about the beliefs and the reason people believe them (from an outsiders perspective) changes views. Nikki, for example, writes about how she was raised Catholic and then came to college and began to wonder why she believed certain things. By no means am I saying that she did not learn the reasons behind her beliefs, but all small children tend to blindly believe what they are told. Perhaps coming to a religion later in life with a more mature perspective, one better understands the reasoning behind beliefs. I know that this was true for me even in high school when I learned a lot about Catholicism in my theology classes. I vividly remember one day my freshman year that one of my good friends at the time grew angry at me when I was studying evolution for biology class. Even though I had just learned in my Catholicism class how religion and science were very compatible, she chose to ignore that belief and stuck with her fundamentalist beliefs about evolution. Although she is Catholic, she ignored the reasoning behind the true teaching on evolution and told me that I could not believe in God or be Christian if I believed in evolution which really hurt my feelings. Since I had learned about her religion from an outsiders perspective, surprisingly I knew more about it than her. That day I also experienced first-hand the pain that religious ignorance can cause.
I have been talking about religion through out this entry but what is religion? In class on Tuesday Professor Bump brought up a good point on the generalization of meanings of words. I had the idea of a religion being a set of beliefs and practices which pertained to a higher being. And to me, Jainism at first seemed more like a way to live (like a hippy life-style) rather than an actual religion. Although it strove toward a better life, it seemed contradictory that “absolute Ahimsa is impossible” (117). Looking up the formal definition of “religion” in the online Oxford English Dictionary, however, I find that Jainism in its extreme peacefulness and resistance to violence is in fact a religion since it is “devotion to some principle.” It seemed that the most fitting definition for our discussion of religion is an “action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please or a particular system of faith and worship.” Thus, Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all are religions in their own ways.
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