Anthropological Purpose Of Religion

Anthropological or sociological approaches to religion and belief system was long influenced since the early 1800. Bruce and Yearley (2006) defined religion “as a social phenomenon that consists of beliefs, actions and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose.” In The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006), in the context meaning of religion “sacred things are believed to be so extraordinarily important, powerful, and different from mundane or profane affairs that they need to be protected by special rules and restrictions or taboos.” They also stated that belief system “denotes any complex of interrelated propositions. The ‘system’

In correspond with the appearance of the distributions of power, status and wealth during that current time, not only seen as natural but also given by God, the jurisdiction turned divine and thus the control towards the society becomes a piece of cake. Hence, the ideological purpose of religion is the concept of reification. This phenomenon happens when the ideologies is embodied and implied, where the genuine producer of social relations is divine law. Divine law can be explained as rules and statue that is directly influenced by “the will of God”, rather than man. As followed, this is a modal of social control, where workers have to self-control instead of imposing the owner

Which provides a vast opportunity for the privilege to be justified and protected while the poor and wretched are only to accept their place. Thus he argued it “should not only be dismissed, but dismissed with scorn”. Followed by Durkheim who proposed religion is created by the society to make man to put themselves as priority after the needs of the society and to help to maintain the solidarity of the society. He believed in sustaining the law of moral society and support functionalism. Meanwhile Weber stated that religion can be developed into many different and unique ways, causing a breakthrough industrialisation. Despite the different views on different perspective of the same topic, they contributed significantly to the discipline of sociology of religion and are acknowledged till today, even in the modern society. Religion and beliefs can be summarized as the needs and a light to show man to positivism and