A religion is a doctrine, whose bases are the belief and praise towards divine and superior beings known as gods, who are held responsible for the creation of the world from the theological point of view. A religion gives its knowledge to those who have faith in it, so that they defend it and indoctrinate others. The religions are many and are strongly associated with the cultural customs of each region; generally, the believers of one religion view with disapproval what the fervent of another do.
This occurs since there are traditions rooted in the different theological foci that imply actions of worship such as acts of sacrifice of animals and previously of humans as well, which, by other societies of greater position in the world are not considered pleasant and those who practice such acts have even been expelled.
What is religion
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What is religion? It can be said that religion represents the customs and symbols established by an idea of divinity or something sacred. This is a doctrine made up of beliefs and principles around existential, spiritual and moral things.
Among the characteristics of religion are:
- It is projected through symbols, such as myths or stories (oral or written), objects of sacred art, bodily expressions and rituals.
- It is structured around the belief in one or more forces superior to the human being.
- Build an ethical code.
- It justifies the characteristics of life, so it provides comfort and / or hope.
- Distinguish between the sacred and the profane.
- It is an interpretation of life, to which he attributes a maximum value.
- It favors the cohesion of the group that practices it.
- Form a project for the future.
- You need a prophet or a shaman.
Evolution of religion in society
Today, the political state is the one who directs nations today, except for countries still rigid by empires such as Korea and England. However, the story told about the colonization of America shows an ecclesiastical hierarchy that dominated Europe. The kings, for their part, constituted a representation of the divinity in which they believe on earth, this king or queen, indoctrinated his people with moral and faith principles, thus representing what is religion for them.
Religions exist for the social purpose of nurturing faith. The human being is inherent in the fact that in order to live he must believe in something not palpable, to believe in the possibility that there is an almighty God who guides him on the path of destiny. It is important for humanity to have a religious identity, to have faith, to have hope, so that it can live love.
The world after secularism
The term secularism comes from the Greek word laos, which designates people understood as an indivisible unit, the ultimate reference to all decisions made for the common good. Secularism derives that universalist ideal of organization from the city and the legal device that is founded and carried out at its base. Secularism is a social regime of coexistence, whose political institutions are legitimized by popular sovereignty and not by religious elements.
Types of religion
Theism
Theism is the belief in the existence of one or more deities or gods that exist within the universe and yet exceed or are independent of physical existence. These gods also interact in some way with the universe and are often considered omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
Deism and polytheism incorporate what theism is. Pantheism in turn, represents the belief in a God superior to the universe and many other variants. What it does not include is atheism or the belief that there are no gods and agnosticism or the belief that it is unknown whether or not gods exist.
Non-theists
It is a religious definition that refers to those spiritual or philosophical currents of beliefs that do not accept a creator or absolute god, these deny the existence of an almighty capable of making or fulfilling some type of request.
Pantheism
In this religion, its believers regard the universe as a God. Pantheists do not believe in a personal god, rather; they believe that God is an impersonal force, not an anthropomorphic one.
Revealed religions
It is known by the name of religions revealed to Christianity, Judaism, Islam. They are revealed because each of them was founded on the belief of effective communication from God with the chosen people.
Undisclosed religions
Undisclosed religions are defined as messages sent by deities through their spiritual messengers, although they may contain elaborate deity organization systems that acknowledge the existence of these spiritualities in the manifestations of nature.
Religious sects
Religious sects can be defined as small groups or societies of believers separated from the common conceptualization of what religion is, this represents a type of culture far removed from what other religious or spiritual groups follow and execute. These follow doctrines and practices contrary to the common faith of Biblical Christianity.
A cult is a religious perversion. It is a belief and practice in the world of religion that demands devotion to a religious concept or leader (or group) centered on a false doctrine. It is an organized heresy, a sect can also be defined as a group of people gathered to praise a common deity.
World's most important religions
Today the world religious issue is in the public arena due to the negative events that have happened around them, wars, violence, and the use that has been given to the various religious doctrines to mock or rob the faithful of some deity especially.
Catholicism
The Catholic religion is one of the most followed in the world, since the colonizers profess it and therefore, when they arrived in new lands, with force and obligation they introduced it to the settlers who received them.
Islam
Hinduism
It is one of the most widespread and important religions in the world, not only because of its number of religious faithful (it has approximately 800 million devotees), but also because of the profound influence it has had on many other religions during its long and uninterrupted activity. History, which began around 1500 BC
Buddhism
Buddhism represents a non-theistic religion, it is not organized by some kind of vertical hierarchy, this means that there is no leader like the Pope in Catholicism. Religious authority is found in the sacred texts of the Buddha and in the interpretation made by teachers and monks.
Ethnic religions
The concept of ethnic religion is a native religion or national religion, it is a religion that is directly related to an ethnic or racial group and that is part of a culture and the identity of a people or nation. Even any practitioner belonging to that ethnic group is indistinguishable from their country of origin. They differ from universal religions that practice any of any racial, cultural, national or ethnic identity.
The definition of religion according to each of these in its original sense, reflects the particular character and psyche of a people, of a culture as a whole, being the spiritual and collective expression of that group that develops in history. Although the professed doctrine generally depends on the culture, the individual will be spiritually more in harmony with the original traditions of his ancestors than with the traditions of foreign peoples.
Chinese traditional religion
It is the native and indigenous religion of the Chinese people. It is a polytheistic religion and with certain elements of shamanism and is deeply influenced by Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.
It is followed by millions of people both in mainland China and in Taiwan and many other Chinese communities. The Chinese government is officially secular, sponsoring Confucianism and Buddhism only with some reservation. In the case of Taiwan, official government statistics state that the majority of the population is formally Buddhist. Despite this, the cultural influence of the Chinese religious tradition is appreciable.
At present, the Chinese government has immersed itself in neutrality with respect to the religious issue, in practice tolerance is only allowed with the traditional Chinese religion. As a result, non-traditional religions are practiced semi-clandestinely. Despite this situation, in recent years there has been a greater interest of the population in religious issues.
Among the reasons for this are:
- The search for a meaning of human existence.
- The relationship between religion and the cure of certain diseases.
- The need to find a personal balance against the competitiveness of Chinese capitalism.
The resurgence of spirituality and different religions has caused some concern to the Chinese government, because in the communist tradition everything religious has been valued as a pernicious symptom based on popular superstition.
Orthodox
This term is used to classify the Eastern Christian religious doctrine that was founded in the 19th century as an Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Church or simply Orthodox Church when it is separated from the Catholic Apostolic Church in Rome. The orthodox is that which complies with the traditional and generalized norms or that faithfully follows or agrees with the principles of a doctrine, a trend or an ideology.
Protestantism
This represents a Christian movement born in the sixteenth century, from the Protestant reform of Martin Luther.
This definition of religion is based on the groups that separated from the Roman Catholic Church on the occasion of the reform. The German theologian and religious reformer Martin Luther precipitated the Protestant Reformation by publishing his 95 theses in 1517 denouncing the indulgences and excesses of the Catholic Church.
Calvinists were also called "Protestants," as were Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and others. In contemporary times, the terms "Protestant" and "Protestantism" are used among profane and Catholic circles in reference to those who call themselves "Evangelical Christians": Adventists, Anabaptists, Baptists, Calvinists, Christians, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Presbyterians, Jehovah Witnesses.
Judaism
Judaism was the first monotheistic religion in the history of mankind (more than three thousand years) and is one of the great Abrahamic religions along with Christianity and Islam. The word Judaism is of Greek origin iudaïsmos which means Judah.
For Judaism, the Torah is the law, its authorship is attributed to Moses and it narrates the Origin of the world, apart from the revelation of the Divine Laws and Commandments. The term Torah includes all the books of the Hebrew Bible and is often called Tanach by the Israelites. Both the Torah and the Tanakh constitute for the Christians of the Old Testament, in view of the fact that Judaism does not recognize as its own the deuterocanonical books, nor the New Testament.
On the other hand, the synagogue, the temple of the Jewish religion, fulfills the function of gathering the faithful for the practice of reading the sacred texts, under the guidance of a priest, called a Rabbi, who does not necessarily have a different social status than grant you privileges. Furthermore, it can be said that the Jewish religion is not a homogeneous religion, so we can divide it into:
Yoruba
This concept of religion is known as Santeria and has its origin in Africa, but it has gained many adherents in the Americas since it arrived in these lands during the Colony. His followers are also known as Yorubas, Santeria or Lukumises, this is a common term in Cuba, where they began to be called due to the phonetics of their greeting: “oluku mi”, which means “my friend”.
To talk about the Yoruba religion, we have to talk about the African Yoruba peoples. These villages settled between the Volta River and Cameroon around the 5th century AD. C. They were more advanced socially, economically, and politically than neighboring cities. In the Yoruba religion agriculture and the iron forge predominated.
As early as the thirteenth century, the Yoruba kingdoms were formed in the territories south of Nigeria. Two of those kingdoms completely dominated the rest: Ifé and Oyó. Their organization and respectful way of life helped them live in harmony. They practiced agriculture, long-distance trade, mining, and crafts.
Most of the Yoruba gods were completely identified with the images of Catholic saints, by the need to adapt their beliefs to the demands of the Catholic religion, and at the same time to the beliefs of hundreds of thousands of slaves, women, men and children stolen from their homes and transferred against their will to the American continent, capturing without distinction kings, princes, rich people, farmers, great warriors and babalawos.
The need for syncretism arose naturally and spontaneously. His name "Santeria" is a term derived from the word saint, because the slaves respected the gods of the whites with the logical thought that "they must be very powerful when they have them as masters and we as slaves."
Notably, many native Yoruba were taken and taken as slaves to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Venezuela and mainly in the 14th century (after the fall of the Oyo Empire and as a result, the region was plunged into a war civil) between religious beliefs. This definition of religion represents a set of concepts combined with the pre-existence of African cults, Christianity, Native American mythology, and Kardecist spiritism in various Yoruba lineages outside of Africa.
Religions in Mexico
Currently the religions of Mexico, an Aztec country, there are thousands of registered religious organizations, which have a large number of followers and devotees. There are approximately 6,484 registered religious associations, which are divided as follows: 2,969 are Catholic, Apostolic and Roman; Pentecost 1,690; 1,558 Baptists; 67 Presbyterians; 53 spiritists; 24 Orthodox; 14 Adventists; 9 Lutherans; 9 beans; 8 in the Buddhist religion; 6 Methodists; 5 of the light of the world; 4 Christian scientists; 4 correspond to new expressions; 3 Hindus; 2 of Jehovah's Witnesses; 2 krhisnas; 2 Islamic and Anglican, 1 from the Mormons and 1 more from the Salvation Army, these are the religions of Mexico.
The context of the Churches of the Mexican religion is diverse and wide, although the Catholic religion continues to dominate the country, more and more other beliefs are opening and growing.
The Roman Catholic religion is the most popular Mexican religion with 82.7% of the population associated. The Mexican Catholic Church is a subset of world Catholicism led by the Pope based in the Vatican. Mexican Roman history is divided into colonial and postcolonial.
Among the world's religions, Mexico is the second largest Catholic country in the world with 18 ecclesiastical provinces and a total of 90 dioceses. The Catholic religion in Mexico has 15,700 diocesan priests and more than 45,000 people in the religious order. In addition, the number of members exceeds 75 million, despite the fact that in recent years it has decreased considerably.
It is important to mention that non-religious denominations in Mexico include atheism, deism, agnosticism, secularism, and skepticism. 4.7% of the Mexican population is atheist or agnostic. An atheist or agnostic person in Mexico is defined as any person who does not literally practice the faith or who does not attribute to any religion or practice any religious activity.
The number of people attending church has dropped dramatically in Mexico. Less than 3% of Catholics attend church daily, even though 47% attend Mass weekly. The number of atheists in the country is growing by 5.7% per year, while Catholics are growing by 1.7%.
