Religion is as old as mankind. Primitive man had primitive religions and he worshipped the elements of nature like sun, earth, air, cloud, water etc. Advances in civilisation led to institutionalised religions. The basic characteristics of all religions are similar. There is firm belief in a higher, unseen controlling power. Religion appears to be a psychological necessity for mankind. However,...

A religion usually is defined as a collection of beliefs about God and his relation with the universe and individual persons. There are many religions in the world, but I will deal only with the major world religions, which include Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The beliefs of these religions are documented in certain books, which are considered to be sacred and used for ...

define, because compared to others it is both unique and contentious. Although the movement is relatively new it only became known in the West in 1970s it is firmly rooted in some of the world's oldest religions, philosophies and practices, including Hinduism, Wicca, Druidism, the worship of goddesses and nature, spiritism, spiritualism, Gnosticism, humanism, ancient Egyptian and Babylonian rel...

Article history: Received 21 March 2011 Revised 28 February 2012 Accepted 5 March 2012 Available online 26 March 2012 The purpose of this paper is (1) to identify critical issues in the current literature on ethical leadership — i.e., the conceptual vagueness of the construct itself and the focus on a Western-based perspective; and (2) to address these issues and recent calls for more collabora...

The word spirit with a small "s", has many meanings. It may mean 1) one of the elements in man which is considered as separable from the flesh and animating the body; or, 2)a person, from the moral, emotional or-intellectual point of view; or, 3) a person's disposition, permanent or temporary mental attitude, or, predominance of the spirit over the flesh especially as manifested in courage, ene...

Research into human development involves the use of human embryos and their derivative cells and tissues. How religions view the human embryo depends on beliefs about ensoulment and the inception of personhood, and science can neither prove nor refute the teaching of those religions that consider the zygote to be a human person with an immortal soul. This Spotlight article discusses some of the...

One of the central claims of Norenzayan et al.'s article is that supernatural monitoring and intergroup competition have facilitated the rise of large-scale prosocial religions. Although the authors outline in detail how social instincts that govern supernatural monitoring are honed by cultural evolution and have given rise to Big Gods, they do not provide a clear explanation for the success of...

Introduction There is a sense in which all intellectual work on religion has a reifying effect. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences necessarily construct religions as particular kinds of object. That is, they take some human emotions, ideas, artefacts and activities and frame them as things called „religions‟. Accounts of these religions provide the basis for inferring something call...

In the process of studying religions, we often overlook the secular aspects of religious organizations. This paper examines the basic flows of money in different spiritual organizations, and attempts to correlate the types of income with the structure of the priestly hierarchy. This analysis is by no means comprehensive. In the end, more questions are raised than are answered. Patrick Cody Reli...