Defining what a religion is is certainly not an easy task. For countless millennia humanity has worshiped a pantheon of deities, whether it was the Sun seen in ancient Aztec culture or the God of the Jews. Therefore a definition of what religion is must be accessible and broad as it appears to address a myriad of beliefs that differ in scope. The three definitions I have chosen to analyze focus primarily on the nature of faith within a religion. For example, Marx saw religion as a means of slavery to maintain the status quo through the impartiality of an ideology that maintained absolute balance leading to stagnation and therefore a lack of change. So belief in a religion is simply the reaction of the oppressed to offer them a shadow of comfort in a “heartless world”. Tylor focused on the notion of faith as the definition of religion, as religion itself is formulated by primitive man explaining what he did not understand by giving all things of the Soul the task of explaining what they could not understand. He claims that belief in spiritual beings is animism and that humanity has brought with it the resulting ignorance. Feuerbach's definition is certainly challenging in that his definition of God is a construct of Man, rather than the traditional opposite. Feuerbach, like Tylor and Marx, focus on the nature of faith within religion, I chose this because I would prefer to focus on religious faith, rather than practice, due in part to Freud's insistence that religious practice is a neurosis that has spread through the generations, and I also would prefer to be able to make comparisons between the three definitions with the nature of the belief being a funda...... middle of paper......primitive man could not understand, and as such they are the result of the ignorance of primitive society. Tylor therefore argues that the idea of a belief in a God or Gods is the result of the "survival" of religion. Tylor argues that religious survival is due to the fact that some are guilty of limiting and relying on an obsolete habit while science can explain such distant phenomena. This explanation is difficult to classify, since it is certainly a sociological explanation, as well as an anthropological and psychological one. Studies analyzed by Keleman identified that children appear to identify certain objects in a similar method to Tylor's animism in that things are given a morality – positive or negative based on the likelihood of causing harm to the child. This may be evidence in support of Tylor's thesis that through knowledge such things become more than good or bad.
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