Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Criticism of religion" in English language version.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Moreover, belief systems also play a crucial role in shaping people's levels of subjective well-being. Evidence from scores of societies containing almost 90 percent of the world's population indicates that, in an overwhelming majority of countries, religious people are happier than non-religious people, even though they tend to have lower incomes...People have an enduring need for a sense of meaning in life, and a strong belief system, whether religious or secular, tends to be linked with relatively high levels of subjective well-being. At this point in history, happy atheists are heavily outnumbered by those who find a sense of meaning in religion.
Table 1.2 presents various religious groups and the number of adherents of each in the United States and in the world. This information is important because much of the research on religion and health has been conducted in the United States.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)In the late Victorian period it was common to write about the 'warfare between science and religion' and to presume that the two bodies of culture must always have been in conflict. However, it is a very long time since these attitudes have been held by historians of science
In its traditional forms, the conflict thesis has been largely discredited.
Instead, as is clearly shown in Figure 3.3, societies with greater faith in science also often have stronger religious beliefs."
... this book consists mainly of a critique of the concept of religion ... .
In some belief systems, religious leaders and believers maintain the right to both emphasise the benefits of their own religion and criticise other religions; that is, they make their own claims and deny the truth claims of others.
people of every religion, as well as of no religion, have a reason for wanting it to be possible to face other people with challenges to their faith, namely that this is the only way those people can be brought to see the truth.
Due to the nature of religious belief, one person's faith often implies that another's is wrong and perhaps even offensive, constituting blasphemy. For example, the major world religions often have very different formulations and beliefs concerning god or gods, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and the Hindu deities, as well as about various ethical and social matters
... the distinction between ancient worlds (in which the notions of religion and being religious did not exist) and modern worlds (in which ideas of religion produced from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century have come to structure everyday life in many parts of the world). ... "Although the Greeks, Romans, Mesopotamians, and many other peoples have long histories, the stories of their respective religions are of recent pedigree. The formation of ancient religions as objects of study coincided with the formation of religion itself as a concept of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Before the seventeenth century, the word "religion" and its cognates were used relatively infrequently. Equivalents of the term are virtually nonexistent in the canonical documents of the Western religions – the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. When the term was used in the premodern West, it did not refer to discrete sets of beliefs and practices, but rather to something more like "inner piety," as we have seen in the case of Aquinas, or "worship." As a virtue associated with justice, moreover, 'religio' was understood on the Aristotelian model of the virtues as the ideal middle point between two extremes – in this case, irreligion and superstition.
Just like the notion itself, the most general questions concerning religion, its nature and definition, its origins or expressions, were born in the West.... From there they were transferred, much later and at the cost of daring generalizations, to all other cultures, however remotely prehistoric or exotic.
The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of ... the formation of the terms Boudhism (1801), Hindooism (1829), Taouism (1839), Zoroastrianism (1854), and Confucianism (1862). ... This construction of 'religions' was not merely the production of European translation terms, but the reification of systems of thought in a way strikingly divorced from their original cultural milieu.
'In spite of the fact that the highly advanced ... writing systems [of Mesoamerica] are capable of expressing and recognising abstract representations in the languages, extant pre-Columbian Mesoamerican inscriptions do not contain words which can be rendered as "religion". ... [N]ative terms for "religion" [found in Spanish dictionaries of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries] were in reality constructed by the Spanish ethnographer-missionaries in order to promote evangelisation ... .' ... it is still a common practice to translate a number of words in different ancient languages as 'religion.' ... the contexts in which these terms occur often make such translations problematic. ... ancient Hebrew and Aramaic simply have no word that is routinely translated into modern languages as 'religion.'
Although most people have a vague sense of what religion is, scholars have had (and continue to have) an extremely difficult time agreeing on a definition of religion.
... one of our major anthropological notions is, in the final analysis, possessed of only a rather vague definition, derived through successive reductions and simplifications from its Christian usage.
A number of medieval scholars regarded vegetarianism as a moral ideal, not because they were concerned for the welfare of animals, but because of the fact that the slaughter of animals might cause the individual who performs such acts to develop negative character traits, viz., meanness and cruelty
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.
In some belief systems, religious leaders and believers maintain the right to both emphasise the benefits of their own religion and criticise other religions; that is, they make their own claims and deny the truth claims of others.
people of every religion, as well as of no religion, have a reason for wanting it to be possible to face other people with challenges to their faith, namely that this is the only way those people can be brought to see the truth.
Due to the nature of religious belief, one person's faith often implies that another's is wrong and perhaps even offensive, constituting blasphemy. For example, the major world religions often have very different formulations and beliefs concerning god or gods, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and the Hindu deities, as well as about various ethical and social matters
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)In some belief systems, religious leaders and believers maintain the right to both emphasise the benefits of their own religion and criticise other religions; that is, they make their own claims and deny the truth claims of others.
people of every religion, as well as of no religion, have a reason for wanting it to be possible to face other people with challenges to their faith, namely that this is the only way those people can be brought to see the truth.
Due to the nature of religious belief, one person's faith often implies that another's is wrong and perhaps even offensive, constituting blasphemy. For example, the major world religions often have very different formulations and beliefs concerning god or gods, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and the Hindu deities, as well as about various ethical and social matters
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)A number of medieval scholars regarded vegetarianism as a moral ideal, not because they were concerned for the welfare of animals, but because of the fact that the slaughter of animals might cause the individual who performs such acts to develop negative character traits, viz., meanness and cruelty
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)