Non-Western Religions

According to the sociologist Max Weber, the difference between primitive and historic-era religious traditions is the difference between magical and rational explanations of human experience of the universe (Gerth and Mills 51). But even in the modern period, attachments to nonrational explanations for or senses of the cosmos persist. Ellwood (4) speaks to this when he refers to unconditioned reality as being equivalent to "Divine or Ultimate Reality of religion and philosophy." Throughout his work, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich also refers to "ultimate concern," or human consciousness of the cosmos that sights the limits of material certainty or indeed reason and logic but that nevertheless also senses importance beyond such certainty or reason. All rational beings experience such limits, says Tillich, which are their ultimate concern and which inhere in a God-concept (ST I 35ff et passim; Ultimate passim).

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ive can be found throughout the world; Genesis is a core Judeo-Christian myth. But Ellwood cites the "narrative expressions" of other religions as well. Daoism features "the legend of Laozi rejecting a complex society to find harmony and balance in nature." This indirectly argues that life can find purpose and meaning. Hinduism and Buddhism, on the other hand, feature a myth of eternal cycles of creation and destruction, which makes history and time meaningless, "except in relative terms" (Ellwood 9). Details of the Hindu cosmology indirectly offer a critique of materialist preoccupation and argue purpose for historical experience, albeit within the dominant cosmology of eternal cycles: dharma, or one's social role; karma, or the idea that one reaps what one sows; samsara, or the realm of individual material existence; and moksha, or release from samsara and karma (Kinsley 187-8). The purpose of Hindu life is to accomplish moksha, by way of dharma, which suggests the religion reaches not only theoretical but also practical and sociological concern. Buddhist thought, which has various "sectarian" expressions and which also embraces a cyclical cosmology, is consist about four basic truths: 1) that all life is inevitably sorrowful;
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Approximate Word count = 2068
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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