A world of religions...

In this world, there are thousands of cultures and groups. Not surprisingly, none of them (according to studies) have no religion. It doesn’t matter how ignorant or small the group is. People always create religions because they want to handle the situation that they can do nothing about, and find good explanations to them. Illness, misfortune, and death are some things that happen to everyone depite their power or their place in their societies. People always create religions in order to achief the least of control they can have over these supernatural powers. Humans found themselves in this world leaded by it’s rules, and guided by higher powers…..all they wanna do is achief enough knowledge about this supernatural power that controls them, but they can’t find that in the visible world they see, so now it’s time for the mind to sail and come with reasonable enterpretations for that.

Many people say that religion is the belief of the weak mentalities, but the only the opposite is true. In a world where so many things do not make sence, people must seek away that they can claim awareness of what’s going around them. The concept of God comes from such ideology.

In the world, we can classify the types of relgions into 5 types:

Animism: generally the belief in a living thing that it has a special power, and they have more control by it.

Animatism: giving unliving things (such as rivers, trees,..etc) the authority of living things (talking, eating, thinking,…etc) in order to give them a holy place.

Ancestral spirits: the belief in the power of the ancestors when they die (ancient Egyptians, some African beliefs, Hinduism,..etc).

Polytheism: the belief in multiple gods ( ancient greeks, ..etc).

Monotheism : the belief in the concept of one god (Islam, Christianity, Judaism,..etc).


Most of the world religions will fit in at least one of these types (it might fit 2 or 3 of them). The interesting thing is that anthropologists succeeded in dividing these types due to the number of people in the society. Bands (10 to 100 individual) mostly go with animism, animatism, and ancestral spirits. Tribes (200 to 1000 individual) go with the same as bands, but they can be more on ancestral spirits. Chiefdoms (more than 3000 individual) will go mostly with polytheism, and some monotheism. States (more than 20,000 or so) will fit mostly with monotheism (most cases).

What we get from such studies is that all these religions are believed to be right for their people, so it’s always a matter of accusing the other’s religion. We can see that the smaller the group of people, the wider the imagination goes for explaining supernatural powers. Small groups don’t have to have basic instructions that they can’t turn left or right from them. They can always add new things, and create others. Their minds are totally free in this matter. And freedom goes to be reduced more and more when the number of the group gets bigger. That has it’s own explanation too.

When groups of people get bigger, they always try to have a main concern that they will all agree on in order to keep order in the group, for example in chiefdoms appears polytheism for the first time because the rulers of these chiefdoms would like to have such ultimate power over their people in order to make them walk behind them. Such method is not needed in small groups where people know each other, and know they all can’t have such ultimate powers. With the states, the concept is different. In the states, people must unite in one spiritual matter that they can all agree in order to make it possible to rule all these people from different cultures and heritages under one chair.

These studies cannot be perfect, because we can clearly see that it doesn’t apply in all situations, but what’s important is that it is a serious try to understand how we people think due to our mental and material needs, and due to what we have (knowledge). It is a try to understand the human race as one mass, disregarding the races, and environments.





source of information: Cultural Anthropology by Haviland