Religion

 Basics of Religion

In many religious traditions, the emphasis is not on belief, but rather it is on participation in ceremonies. Ceremonies are often about community, about bringing people together and reinforcing the heritage that binds them together. [2]

Religion may best be understood as an evolved complex of traits incorporating cognitive, affective, behavioral, and developmental elements selected to solve an adaptive problem. [4]

Structural Functionalism 

Structural functionalism, in sociology and other social sciences, a school of thought according to which each of the institutions, relationships, roles, and norms that together constitute a society serves a purpose, and each is indispensable for the continued existence of the others and of society as a whole. In structural functionalism, social change is regarded as an adaptive response to some tension within the social system. When some part of an integrated social system changes, a tension between this and other parts of the system is created, which will be resolved by the adaptive change of the other parts. [6]

Cognitive scientists have reexamined the supernatural beliefs of religious systems and have concluded that such beliefs are merely a “byproduct of numerous, domain-specific psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve other (mundane) adaptive problems” (Kirkpatrick 1999:6). Rejecting any adaptive function of religious beliefs per se, these researchers view the conceptual foundations of religion as deriving from categories related to “folkmechanics, folkbiology, (and) folkpsychology”. Supernatural agents, similar to moving dots on computer screens or faces in the clouds, are simply the result of innate releasing mechanisms of agency detection modules evolved to respond to animate, and therefore potentially dangerous, entities. [4]

Religious Practice

Cross culturally there are four Components to religion; Belief in supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts; Communal participation in costly ritual; Separation of the sacred and the profane; and Importance of adolescence as the life history phase most appropriate for the transmission of religious beliefs and values. These four elements emerge and reemerge throughout the anthropological and sociological literature and encompass cognitive, behavioral, affective, and developmental aspects of religious systems across a wide variety of cultures. Although each trait may be variably expressed across different socio ecological systems, their recurrence in societies as diverse as totemic Arunta hunter-gatherers and Protestant American industrialists suggests that they constitute basic elements of religion. [4]

Anthropological and psychological evidence, however, suggests that supernatural agents of religious belief systems not only engage, but also modify, evolved mental modules. Moreover, they do so in socioecologically specific and developmentally patterned ways. Although agency detection modules probably do give rise to the human ability to imagine a broad array of supernatural agents, those that populate individual religions are neither random nor interchangeable. Whether supernatural agents are envisioned as totemic spirits, ancestral ghosts, or hierarchical gods is very much dependent upon the socioecological context in which they occur. [4]

Ritual

Rituals are distinguished by a specific set of physical features pertaining to the characteristic aspects of the individual actions that compose them, which tend to be structured in rigid, formal, and repetitive ways. The invariability of its performance is also linked to certain psychological elements that come with performing the ritual, typically enhancing its meaning. To constitute a ritual, a set of behaviors must include characteristic physical features (e.g., rigid, repetitive action sequences) as well as certain psychological features (i.e., the user must interpret the ritual to have a purpose or meaning). Moreover, the meaning inherent in a ritual is often acted

out through overt symbolic expression. Unsurprisingly then, they are often associated with the idea of self-transcendence and sanctity, with strong links to religion and spiritualism. The final element of ritual serves as the connecting piece between the physical and psychological features. By having (a) segmented, rigid, formal, and repetitive actions (physical); and (b) symbolic value (psychological), rituals also tend to be goal demoted. That is, rituals either lack overt instrumental purpose, or their constitutive actions themselves are not immediately causally linked to the stated goal of the ritual. Some rituals, for instance, family rites during the holiday season, may be highly symbolic and meaningful but less rigid; whereas, others, such as those marked by certain psychopathologies, may be less meaningful but completely invariant and rule bound. [5]

Ritual is the convergence of the two levels of mental processing—“where top-down meets bottom-up”. Bottom-up perception refers to the processing of stimulus features as they come in, combining the individual parts to create a whole (data driven). Bottom-up processing includes the recruitment of perceptual, attentional, and memory stimulus features tied to the ritual or the surrounding environment. These processes derive from the sensorimotor elements of ritual—the experience or enactment of particular physical actions. Because they are comprised of highly stereotyped action sequences (characterized by rigidity, formality, and repetition), rituals tend to be parsed into segmented action units. This form of event segmentation, akin to object segmentation, is a naturally occurring cognitive process that economizes perception and guides attention. Stimulus is first framed by various expectations and interpretations (rule driven). Top-down processing is associated with the integration of these physical motoric features into broader narratives, appraisals, and interpretations. This context dependent processing that is done before, during, and after ritual performance involves the elaboration of stimulus properties into meaning appraisals, which often reaffirms the purpose of completing the rite in the first place. [5]

Rituals can regulate (a) emotions, (b) performance goal states, and (c) social connection to others. Rappaport (1967, 1971) formally pieced together the notion of ritual as a type of regulatory process, recognizing that rituals are enacted, at times, as a way to monitor and maintain various psychological and sociocultural states. He saw rituals as a type of cybernetic or monitoring control system—not unlike the feedback system of a thermostat—for individual and group behaviors. This thinking closely aligns with cybernetic control models in psychology and neuroscience: Fluctuating psychosocial states are first detected and then compared against an ideal (future) reference state. If a discrepancy is found to exist, the ritual is triggered, closing off the loop and resolving the discrepancy. [5]

Rites of Passage

The most common ceremony is the rite of passage which marks an individual’s change in social status, such as adulthood, marriage, and death. Rites of passage, while nearly universal in all cultures, are not necessarily religious and many are purely secular. [2] 

From the 1960s through the early 1980s, the classic structural functionalist view of rites of passage was challenged and revised. The charge was led by the British anthropologist Victor Turner, who acknowledged the contribution of structural functionalism to the study of rites of passage and of the broader category of ritual while pointing out its limitations. In his study of African rites of passage, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), Turner revealed the drama and flux of everyday social life and highlighted the agency of rites in effecting social change, which he considered to be their fundamental role. Building upon van Gennep’s observation that rites of passage and other rituals are liminal in that they temporarily extricate participants from their social statuses, Turner argued that rites of passage are antithetical to existing social structure and “subjunctive” because they invite new possibilities. Rites enable participants to experiment with alternative social relations or to invent new ones. [1]

People throughout the world have heightened emotions during times of major life changes.  These stressful changes may be physiological or social in nature.  They are usually connected with personal transitions between important stages that occur during our lives.  These transitions are generally emotionally charged--they are life crises.  Most cultures consider the important transitions to be birth, the onset of puberty, marriage, life threatening illness or injury, and finally death.  Graduation from school, divorce, and retirement at the end of a work life are also major transitions in modern large-scale societies. During the early 20th century, the Belgian anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep, observed that all cultures have prescribed ways for an individual and society to deal with these emotion charged situations.  They have ritual ceremonies intended to mark the transition from one phase of life to another.  Van Gennep called these ceremonies rites of passage click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced.  In North America today, typical rites of passage are baptisms, bar mitzvahs and confirmations, school graduation ceremonies, weddings, retirement parties, and funerals.  These intentionally ritualized ceremonies help the individuals making the transition, as well their relatives and friends, pass through an emotionally charged, tense time.  Most rites of passage are religious ceremonies.  They not only mark the transition between an individual's life stages but they reinforce the dominant religious views and values of a culture.  In other words, they reinforce the world-view. [3]

Resources

1 https://www.britannica.com/topic/rite-of-passage

2. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/3/1/1638764/-Religion-101-Rites-of-Passage 

3. https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/social/soc_4.htm 

4. Alcotra, Candace and Sosis, Richard. Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex

5. The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework Nicholas M. Hobson1*, Juliana Schroeder2*, Jane L. Risen3 , Dimitris Xygalatas4 , and Michael Inzlicht1

6. https://www.britannica.com/topic/structural-functionalism