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Flip to reveal answersWhat is the sacred, in Durkheim's sense?
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All 9 Flashcards — The language of religion
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Question
What is the sacred, in Durkheim's sense?
Answer
What a community sets apart and treats as not ordinary. The profane is everything everyday — the word carries no judgement about worth.
Question
What does myth mean in the study of religion?
Answer
A narrative that carries a community's understanding of origins, order and purpose. It says nothing about whether the events described happened.
Question
What does ritual mean in the study of religion?
Answer
A patterned action whose form is part of its meaning — repeated because the repetition matters, not out of empty habit.
Question
How does a symbol differ from an ordinary sign?
Answer
A symbol participates in what it points to; adherents often treat the symbol and what it signifies as inseparable, rather than as label and thing.
Question
Distinguish transcendent from immanent.
Answer
Transcendent: beyond and outside the created world. Immanent: present and at work within it. Many traditions hold both of the same God.
Question
What do omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent mean?
Answer
All-powerful, all-knowing and all-good.
Question
What is analogy in religious language?
Answer
Using a human word of God in a related and greater sense rather than the ordinary one — Aquinas's answer to the problem that all our words come from the created world.
Question
What is the via negativa?
Answer
The negative or apophatic way: describing the divine only by saying what it is not. It appears in Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Hindu thought.
Question
Distinguish monotheism, polytheism, monism and non-theistic traditions.
Answer
One God; many deities; one ultimate reality of which all is an expression; and traditions whose goal is not union with a creator God.
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Full study notes for The language of religion
Topic 1.1 hub
Studying religion
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