Religions and Methods

According to Anthony Gidden, religion exists in all societies, although religious beliefs and practices vary from culture to culture. All religions involve a set of symbols, involving feelings of reverence, linked to rituals practiced by community of believer.
The first person who proposes to intensively study religion is Mark Muller. He named that study science of religion. The classical scholar use ethnography and anthropology approaches to study religion. Muller observes Hindu’s scripture and interpret it’s by ethnography method; other scholar, like E.B. Taylor uses anthropology method to understand prehistory religion.
The classical theories of religion are influenced by evolution doctrine. There are two principles, these it psychic unity, within the human race, and the pattern of intellectual evolution, or improvement, over time. Prehistory societies defend to nature strength to survive or to keep their families. Thus they try to understand nature and all phenomena.
Two famous classic theory of religion are animism and magic. Taylor say that the origin of religion is animism (from Latin, meaning anima or spirit) that is the belief living, personal power behind all thing. The decline of animism and progress of thought growth the religion. In the other hand Frazer concedes that the origin of religion is magic. Magic theory is assumption that nature work by sympathetic magic, he argue that savage in prehistory always suppose that when two things can some way be mentally associated they must also physically associated in the outside world. Mental connections mirror physical one. Magic more systematic, he says as pseudo scientific. The magic work by two principles: 1. imitative, the magic connect by principle of similarity; and contagious. 2. contagious, the magic of contact, which connect with principle of attachment.
Magic and religion play in key of role, like ritual prostitution etc.
Gidden,--sociologist-- sees that totemism --a species of animal or plant is perceived as possessing supernatural powers-- and animism are common type of religion in smaller cultures. In some religion, like Confucian, there is no God or supernatural God. In the other hand he asserts in huge culture three monotheistic religions are--Islam, Christianity and Judaism-- most influential in the world.
Sociological approaches to religion have been most influenced by Karl Marx (religion as alienation), Emile Durkheim (society as the sacred), and mark Weber (ethic and capitalism).
Lately many scholars propose to new methods to understand religion, one of them is Padden who propose phenomenology of religion approach to understand phenomena which cannot understand by ethnography, anthropology and sociology, however, religion must be understood as a subject --not object—which exist and spoke itself without justification true or false. Padden (Religious as a subject matter: 39) concedes that there are four aspect of the modern comparative approach: (1) respect for all religious fact as “phenomena” rather than item as intrinsically true or false; (2) the need to synthesize these fact trough the analysis of pattern; (3) the need to understand religious experience in term in their context; and (4) underlying the whole enterprise, the need to identify what it is about religious fact that make them religious. Religion as subject constitutes of phenomena, a special kind of experience, system, representation it positioning in the world. Religions cannot be reducible because it have own content and meaning. The language of religion also different with science’s language, some of that language is myth and ritual, that inherent almost in all religion as religious expression.
Religion is everything, its part of our life, societies, cultures, system of doctrine, and system of doctrine whose construct our attitudes, its lies near from body and soul, so we need to find it as a part of our awareness to human existence.[]