This year in intro to religion I learned way more than I thought I ever would. It didn’t feel like to me we covered a wide range of topics but we went into depth with all of the things we covered. It felt to me like we were just building and building upon what we learned that first few weeks and learning to apply it to other things. I am happy with the things we covered thought because the things that we did cover were things I wanted to know more about. I have always been interested in non-christian religions and this year that was the main thing we covered, which kept me interested in everything we covered. If I had to change one thing about the class thought I would cover Christianity more during the semester instead of just touching upon it like we did. It is the main religion that many of us practice and I feel like we as a general population don’t know a lot about our own religion, which is pretty sad. I think that before we start to focus on other religions, we should fist understand our own.

Is Elvis becoming like a “god” and making his own new religion? I think yes. If you look back at the ancient time with Jesus, people didn’t come to really start following him until after he died and rose again and ascended into heaven. Could the same be happening with Elvis? I think it could start going in that direction. If you look at the death week celebration, more and more people come every year. He is only getting more popular and he is still today making millions of dollars of his music that was released thirty years ago. If you think about it, he is more popular today than he was when he was alive. The same is true with Jesus. No one really started to pay that much attention to him until after he died. Now look at today, Christianity is the largest religion in the world. And it is only gaining more followers. Sounds familiar right. None of us have any way of knowing if Elvis will become a “god” in the coming years, and maybe he is just becoming a very popular public icon, but you can’t deny that he is becoming more popular everyday and the trend of the popularity is eerily familiar to the way Christianity started.

Today my grandparents asked me about my religion class and what I was learning in it.  I told them just an overview of the world religions. They asked me which ones and I started naming them, and I realized just how many religions we have learned about and how many other ones that there in the world. We have barely even scratched the surface on the religions of the world, there are so many that none of us have ever heard of that people belong to. If we really wanted to, we could learn about off shoots of each religions, but that would also take forever because if you look at the Christian church alone, there are denominations everywhere for it. I am Lutheran, but I’m from a town that has a Christian Reformed, Reformed, Catholic, Netherlands Reformed, United Reformed, and a Non-Denominational church. That alone is a wide range of offshoots and that is just in Christian church. This semester I have learned so much about the world religions that I never even imagined that I would ever know in my life. It is so interesting that people follow these crazy pilgrimages and do really weird things to bring them closer to their God. Some of the things that Christians do are like that though to, other religions would look at us and laugh. But that’s just the way that the world works today, and there is nothing that we can do about it.

Considering the worldviews of various religions we’ve studied, argue for which pilgrimage best exemplifies or interprets the values of that religion.

The problem with this question is that there are different types of pilgrimages for different religions and there are different reasons for going on a religion for different people. So to analyze or interpret the the pilgrimage that best interprets the values of a religion is hard. If you look from a western religion standpoint, their pilgrimages are about life after death because they believe in one life, but if you look at non-western religions, they believe in a non-personal god and a circular life that never ends. These different viewpoints change the way they look at pilgrimages. Western religions more follow the Turner Model that starts from your world of convention and has you change along the way, whereas non-western religions more follow the Eliade model that just looks for the different aspects of the religion. Some pilgrimages don’t even follow a religious backing at all, people just do it because that’s what they do. For me to pick out which one best exemplifies the values of religion would be difficult because you need to decide on what you determine are the values of religion, and how you look at religion. This is what makes religion so difficult, there is no set in stone way to look at pilgrimage, there is pilgrimages that last a day, some for a week, some for months, all in different models. To figure out which is the best is like trying to find a needle in a haystack because they are all different and unique in there own ways.

The Varanasi Pilgrimage seems like a really weird Pilgrimage to me. Why would anyone want to take a 168 mile pilgrimage. It seems just insane. Walking that would take forever. Granted, they take their time and make stops along the way so it wouldn’t take to long but still, 168 miles is 168 miles. I would just take the one that goes around the temple and has 72 stops. Another thing that really makes me think this is a weird religion and belief is that they cremate their dead in the same water that they worship. To put dead people in the same water you worship and “bathe” in would be a major turn off for me when I am looking at a religion. People even drink out of this “clean” water. Even though that they believe that this is part of their religion, you would think that they would look at science and what it has to tell them about how unhealthy this practice would be. Besides all the dead, cremated ashes floating around, just drinking water from a river is not smart. In my opinion, this religion might need to update itself to the present time and change its opinion on how it handles the water situation. Another thing that confuses me about this religion is that they believe if they go into this river on a certain day, they will be automatically “die” at the end of this life. All of this belief surrounding a river seems a little like hocus-pocus to me, but my religion could sound like that to other people so I’m just going to let them believe what they believe and I will keep believing what I believe.