Religion 101: Philosophy, World Religions, & Religion's Impact on Modern Culture, Study notes of World Religions

Download Religion 101: Philosophy, World Religions, & Religion's Impact on Modern Culture and more Study notes World Religions in PDF only on Docsity! REL 100 Lecture 1 1 If you’ve had a conversation with your friends about whether there’s a God or not, have you ever been in a situation where you wondered why a good and compassionate God who’s all-powerful would allow some terrible thing to happen to you or to a friend or to a family member? Have you ever wondered what Muslims believe or Hindus or Buddhists, or really what’s the difference between Jews and Christians? Have you ever wondered what religion Jesus practiced? Do you simply have a media base understanding of fundamentalism or Satanism or earth based religions? Have you ever wondered much about hypocrisy besides that you don’t like it in other people? Or do you have trouble seeing how very old religious traditions have anything to do with the 21st century? Well, if you answer yes to any of those questions — and a lot of people probably answer yes to most of those — then you’re taking the right class, Religion 100. Religion 100 is called Introduction to Religion and that’s what it is. It’s an introduction to various aspects of religion. Talking about it in a variety perspective, there’s really three sections to the course. The first course is what I might call Philosophy of Religion and in that section we talk about things like what is religion, why are people religious, what about hypocrisy, what needs does religion meet for people. In the second section of the course we’ll talk about things related to the major world religions. We’ll spend a lecture or two and you’ll also see some films related to tribal religions or animistic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the final section of the course is religion today and how does it play out in the 21st century here, in our culture. So we’ll touch on all those kinds of things as we go through this course. REL 100 Lecture 1 2 My name is Lora Hobbs. I’m the instructor for this course. You will have a few lectures that will be given by others in my department, colleagues of mine, but by and large it’s gonna be me you’re gonna be listening to and hearing from here, taking notes from. I’ve worked with this course since 1988 in some facet or another and this is still one of my favorite courses to work with because it really deals with a lot of the questions and issues that most of us think about sometime in life. Generally, in the live class we have a lot of lively discussions about a lot of these topics so you’ll miss out on that by taking this as a video course. But I will give you some opportunities to write some essays throughout the semester where you’ll get to interact with some of the material that we’re talking about and some of the questions that we’re raising, and what your thoughts are on those things. You know, when you think about or if you would consider the institutions in our cultures, the institutions of education, of business, of medicine, media, government, and religion, that every one of those institutions are institutions that religion influences in some way. Religion influences education, media, medicine, government, and policies with other governments in the world. And those institutions also influence religions in our culture. Education influences religion in our culture. The government has an influence on religion in our culture. And so this is a course that not only will you learn some facts, but hopefully you’ll be able to see the world around you and the culture around you differently with maybe a sharper lens or more lenses through which you see either the effects of religion or the way that religion and spirituality is being affected by the institutions of our culture. REL 100 Lecture 1 5 a lecture, you’ll already have some familiarity with what I’m talking about. You can illuminate your answers a little more with how I talk about the material. But also when the test comes over this first unit — and you will be tested over these readings along with other material — those questions will be study guides that you’ll use for these readings. So as far as what do we know out of the readings, you need to know the study questions at the beginning. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute as far as a specific assignment for that. So this is the first book that you’ll need but you do not need to purchase this book. You can find it in the Meyer Library. The other way you can access this book is through the on-line reserves. And so what you do is you go to Library,smsu.edu and on the homepage you’ll find a place where you can go to Course Reserves. Then you can go to On-line Reserves. And then the easiest way generally is to put in your instructor’s last name, and if you do that then it will give you the readings that are specified for you for this course. You may need a password to access those readings once you’re on a library website. If it asks you for a password, it’s simply RELHOBBS. And if that password doesn’t work, check your syllabus to see if that password has been changed over the years. But there should be a password and it’ll be specified in your syllabus so you can access that. Then you can do it from home and you don’t even need to go to the Meyer Library. So this is one book. The other book you will need to purchase — and really it’s the only one that you have to purchase for this on-line course — is this book, World’s Religions by Huston Smith. You will need this when we come to the second unit of the course. You won’t REL 100 Lecture 1 6 need this right away, but you’ll be reading several chapters out of this book. So this is the one that you do need to purchase. The readings for it are assigned by chapter and those will be specified in your course outline. To help you be able to cover those readings better, I’ve written some study guides over these readings that you’ll be able to find on Blackboard. Also you may have a course packet that those are in. And that study guide is to help free you a little bit in your reading. This is really a pretty interesting book. It’s got large color pictures that you can look at to see some of the material. But largely I give you those questions so you’ll know specifically what I will test you over, over the readings, and then that’ll kind of free you to read the rest of the information just for your own learning and your own personal understanding. So you need that book. One other book that’s mentioned in your syllabus as a recommended text or an optional text is this one, Religion, A Preface, by John Wilson. This is not required. As the question is from many students, there will be no test questions that come just from this book. Anything that you have on exams will be from lectures, from the assigned readings from other books, and from the films that are assigned but not from this book. This is a good supplement. Actually, this is the book that the person who designed this course wrote based on this course. So if you find yourself wanting some more understanding and it’s like you’re not quite getting it with what I’m giving you in lecture, then you may want to go purchase this book. Otherwise, this is just optional. It’s just there if you would like to have some supplemental reading that coincides with much of what we’ll be doing in the lectures of this class. So you really only need to purchase REL 100 Lecture 1 7 one book. The other book that you need you can do on Course Reserve at the library. One other thing I might mention from the syllabus as you’re looking down through there is under Course Procedures. It talks about what the Blackboard course management system. We will use Blackboard for this course. And what that is is something that you can access on-line. And as you access that, you can get things like your grades. There’s a grade book that’s kept on-line. You can go to Assignments and you can pull up assignments that you have for the class. So if for some reason you didn’t quite get it in the lecture or there wasn’t information given to you in a course packet, then you can go to the Assignment section, pull those up. There’s another section, Course Documents, Course Information, where you can pull up a copy of the syllabus if you should lose your syllabus. And then that will also be used by your instructor to send out e-mails. Now, to be in that Blackboard system, you have to have a Windows NT account through the university. So if you do not have that, then you need to go to one of the computer labs on campus and get a Windows NT account which doesn’t take any time at all. Or also in your syllabus it specifies a website that you can go to where you can set up your PIN and get your NT account set up. Once you have that set up, your instructor will actually enroll you in the course. You do not need to go enroll yourself in Blackboard. Sometimes that creates a lot of confusion for students, especially with Religion 100 that many sections are taught and several of those are on Blackboard. So your instructor will enroll you in Blackboard, but you need to set up a Windows NT account. So if you don’t have that, you need to do that as soon as possible so you can REL 100 Lecture 1 10 them on screen here, we will give you an outline. You’ll probably see that over to my right, on your left side of the screen. And certainly you need at least that outline, but you’ll probably need to add some flesh to that outline. Just what’s on the screen probably won’t be enough for the material that you need, but at least it’ll give you the handles for what’s important and then you can write some explanatory statements with that as you cover the lecture. Also if there are any terms, especially in the second unit, where you have a terms list and a lot of terms to learn from the World’s Religions, we’ll bring those up at the bottom of the screen with terms and definitions for those terms. So hopefully on the screen you’ll have the same information that you would get from a class lecture, just without the interaction, the question/answer. You do have a couple of assignments here from the first day. The first assignment would be the readings from here. Over the next week you need to read those four essays and respond to the study questions at the beginning of those essays. So you need to start getting those together. The essays, especially the one written by Rudolph Otto, is a pretty tedious essay. Don’t let that blow you out of the water. Don’t let that discourage you as far as the course. We will — I will take time to talk about those and try to explain those to you in the course of the lectures. But if you’ve, at least, ahead of time attempted to answer those study questions so you’re somewhat tracking with what I’m talking about, that would be really good. So read those four essays — 2, 3, 4 and 6 — out of this book that’s on reserve in the library and respond to the questions. There’s one exception to that. Essay Number REL 100 Lecture 1 11 2, I believe, that’s written by — yes. It’s written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. On that one, you do not need to answer the questions at the beginning. Rather, just on your study guide sheet, write the word “Religion.” And then, as you read through the essay, make a list of all the things that these writers, in Essay Number 2, say about religion. Where’d it come from, what is it, what’s it do, what’s its problem, why do people turn to religion — just any statements that they say about religion specifically in that essay, in the Marx-Ingalls essay. So you don’t need to answer the questions for that one. Just make a list of everything they say about religion. The other three essays, 3, 4 and 6 — 3 is written by Otto, I believe; 4 is Freud; and 6 is Paul Tillich — with each of those answer the questions at the end of the essays. You have one other assignment. If you did not come to the first day of class and do this in class, then this is an assignment that you need to do and you need to e-mail to your instructor within the next couple of days. And in that essay, what I’d like for you to do is type a one- to two-page essay and I’d like for you to answer three questions. I don’t want you to use a dictionary or an encyclopedia. I don’t want you to go do research on-line. This is just your answers to these questions, okay? So question number 1, what is religion? From the experience you’ve had with religion so far, what you’ve seen of religion or what you’ve heard of religion, how would you define it? If some alien landed here and encountered this thing that we call religion, but didn’t know what it was or they saw that word, how would you explain to them what is religion. Okay? Question 1, what’s religion? Question 2. What has your experience been with religion? Have you observed REL 100 Lecture 1 12 it? Have you been involved in it? Were you involved in it but you got burned in it? Is it something you’re really committed to? Is it something that intellectually you’d like to try to understand but personally — you know, what’s your experience with religion been? There’s a whole gamut. Your experience has no effect on whether you should take this course or not, but your experience will certainly give you certain lenses for how you look at the material in this course. And then what’s your attitude toward religion? Are you skeptical, are you cynical, are you committed, are you ambivalent? How would you describe your attitude towards religion? So that’s a one to two-page typed essay, double-spaced, one inch margins, 12 point font, answering those three questions: what is religion, what has your experience been with religion, and what’s your attitude toward religion? And then e-mail that to your instructor in the next two days, okay? And again, you should have that e- mail address on your syllabus. If you have any problems with Blackboard, with understanding the material in the lecture, with knowing what to study — there will be study guides under the Assignment section of Blackboard for each exam. But if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the instructor at the contacts that are given in your syllabus — phone, e-mail, their office on-campus. But again, generally e-mail is gonna be the most efficient way to contact your instructor. I hope you have a great experience in this course and we’ll start out in the next lecture talking about why it’s even relevant for us to study religion as part of this secular education program that you’re in. Glad you’re in class.