Features of Non-Western Religions
The first half of this semester, we learned a lot about western religions. I think that those were the religions that most of us were somewhat familiar with at least. This week in class, we began learning about non-western religions and to be honest I had no idea what any of those were before our class discussion. Turns out, non-western religions are those such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shinto.
After looking at the three basic features of non-western religions in class, we noticed that they were all pretty much opposite of what western religions were like. Firstly, we know that western religions are monotheistic, meaning they believe in one, personal God. Non-western religions believe in one, non-personal Ultimate Reality. This is a lot different because their Ultimate Reality is like a force, and everything is the one thing. Everything is the “same stuff” as we saw with the play-doh example.
The second difference we found was that non-western religions are nonlinear. Western religions are linear which means they see life with a beginning, middle, end, and heaven after death. With this nonlinear view, time is seen as a circle. When someone dies, they return back to the “same stuff” and it starts all over again. In the next life they try to come back without that stain as we talked about in class. They try to keep the bad karma out, and the good karma in, and this can take multiple lifetimes.
The third feature that we discussed was that the non-western religions focus on praxis rather than on beliefs such as the western religions do. This means that they are more focused on the behaviors, and what people do than what people believe. This also ties in with the whole karma aspect of it. What you decide to do now can not only affect your life, but everyone else around you because everyone is the Ultimate Reality and everyone will be affected as a whole.
It was interesting to learn about the different aspects of non-western religions, and hopefully we will be able to apply our prior knowledge about religion and pilgrimage to the new religions we are going to discuss.
October 20th, 2011 at 5:30 pm
I feel the same way that most of us could relate with the religions the first half of the class. The second half is going to be more difficult for all of us to relate to. After going through everything that they think as religion is helping out. Once we start talking about it more I think it will be easy to get the hang of just like the first half of the class.