Religious Studies is a vitally important, though neglected area of education. Religions underpin the cultural and philosophical heritages which shape our current worldviews. If we are to understand the various cultures of today’s world, we need to know something of the worldviews and values that underlie them. In addition, an understanding of ways in which other peoples and cultures have approached the timeless questions in life can help us to reach our own beliefs and values.
Traditionally, in western society, Religious Studies has been taught doctrinally. Indeed, what has passed as Religious Studies has frequently been ‘Christian Education’ and then often with a narrow, dogmatic idea of what constitutes Christianity. Moreover, even comparative religions have been taught from a doctrinal perspective, failing to recognise religions (or aspects of religions) that do not fit the doctrinal mould. As a result, false distinctions have been constructed and a multitude of religious experiences and practices have been trivialised, ignored, or remained simply invisible to western scholarship.
Ninian Smart’s approach to the teaching of religions is to look at different aspects or ‘dimensions’ of religion in each religious tradition. Thus he looks at the practical and ritual dimension; the experiential and emotional dimension; the narrative or mythical dimension; the doctrinal and philosophical dimension; the ethical and legal dimension; the social and institutional dimension and the material dimension of the different religions. By taking such an approach, Smart avoids the difficulties of trying to define religion while providing a framework within which religions can be compared with each other and with secular ideologies.
Smart’s progressive, even Hegelian, view of religions is one commonly adopted in the teaching of Religious Studies. Lloyd Geering , the father of Religious Studies in New Zealand takes a similarly progressive view, strongly reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s Future of an Illusion. It is a view that lends itself particularly well to the ideology of globalisation. But this is by no means the only approach.
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