Religion is part of a Culture

As we are digging deeper we discover that a culture can be understood in many ways, but one way is as symbolic system that brings forth a world for the member of the culture. A good example is money. Money’s value is symbolic it’s just electronic digits, or fancy bits of paper, of no intrinsic value, but we inspire with such symbolic power that some people are willing to kill to acquire it, suicide for lack of it, and make important decisions according to money. Someone might become a doctor because it pays well, another might seek a particular neighborhood because it is expensive, and therefore has status.

In a very real sense, money is a “system of belief”, reflected in the term “credit”, which comes from the Latin credere: “to believe”. I accept a dollar payment for my work because I believe the money has value, and I have faith that in future I will be to spend that money to acquire things I want. Currencies collapse when people lose faith in them.

The function of such a symbolic system is to regulate human social life. Money “leads” us do socially useful things go to work, earn a living; limits our consumption; enforces discipline through threat of denial, and establishes carrots for people to reach for.

Religion is also considered by anthropologists as such system. It has symbols such as heaven or hell, deities and sacred texts, which again help order human life. For a person inside the religion system, the symbols are real, and have real power over them, just as money is real and has real power for anyone inducted into the money system. Some religionists might find this definition objectionable, because of the idea that the symbolic is not real: but symbol as used here does not mean an arbitrary token representing something else. It means a system of meaning through which we make sense of our experience, and thus create what we call “real” a reality that is shared because we share symbolic systems.

A culture encompasses all these systems, and religion is only one of them. Culture includes religion, but also money, and symbolic systems around food, movement, governance, art, manufacturing, childhood, and every aspect of human life.

Religion is part only part of culture.

CIAO!