The first impression, or what first comes to mind, is in psychology the most important. In the case of the difference between the concept of worldview and the concept of religion, what first comes to mind is that the worldview seems to encompass religion and not the other way around. That is to say, every worldview includes a religion.
However, when we study religion itself, we realize that every religion has a worldview, that is, a way of conceiving and interpreting reality as a whole, and not only the part that refers to the religious feeling or religious nature of the human being. This is why we must conclude that there are no defined boundaries between the two concepts because one encompasses the other; that is, if every worldview has a religion, then every religion has a worldview.
Religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam can be considered as worldviews. The same can be said of ideologies or anti-religions that deny and repress the religious nature of human beings, such as Marxism or historical and dialectical materialism, atheism and agnosticism in general. These too can be considered as worldviews. Both faith and the lack of it give a determined shape to human life.
A worldview seeks to answer fundamental questions such as: Does God exist, as the Creator of everything and everyone, or has the Universe always existed? What is there beyond the universe? Where do I come from, where am I going, who am I, and what is the meaning of life? Where am I? How should I or should I not live my life? What values should I cultivate and what flaws should I fight against?
Both religion and worldview provide answers to these questions. If they answer the same questions, then they have the same field of study, so they could be considered synonyms, or better still, they are one and the same.
The words ethics and morals are one and the same, that is, both refer to human behavior; the first of Greek origin and the second of Latin. The word ethics is used more in the civil world, while the word morals is used more in the religious world. Thus, we understand worldview as corresponding to ethics, because it is used more in the civil world, and religion corresponding to morals, because, obviously, it is used more in the religious world.
The religious phenomenon: "Mysterium tremendum et fascinans"
There are no people, however primitive, where religion is not. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884 - 1942)
There have been and there are societies in the past and present without science, art without philosophy, but there has never been a society without religion. Henri Bergson (1857-1941)
Religare – This is a Christian concept, that is, it is the Christian way of conceiving the religious phenomenon. It assumes the concept of separation. Sin separates us from God, religion connects us back to God because, through religion, God forgives us.
Rudolf Otto's Latin definition of religion is still valid today: Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.... Trembling because it invokes in us feelings of fear, respect and reverence. Fascinating because it provokes in us feelings almost contrary to the former, of attraction, joy and trust. In the Bible, that is, in the biblical religious tradition of Judaism and Christianity, these feelings translate into the often-repeated binomial of fear of God and love of God.
When the agricultural society, especially with the cultivation of cereals, allowed a certain social stratification, the figure of the priest was among the first to emerge, because religion in primitive societies encompassed culture in general, that is, all other activities or everything that was not agriculture.
The priest was the person who performed religious rituals to the deity, he read and interpreted the sacred texts and maintained the place of worship. He was an intermediary between the deity and the people. In all Jewish religions, of Sumer, Egypt and Rome, and in Buddhism and Hinduism, and in traditional African or Latin American religions, this has always been the function of the priest.
Shamans and mediums would be other more sophisticated versions in seeking a relationship and communication between this world and the spiritual and divine world of the spirits and the dead. There is a resurgence of these practices with the New Age religion, which is a sincretism of many religions, including traditional American, Asian and African ones.
In primitive societies, the civil and religious leaderships were united in one person and one position. We see in the Bible that Samuel not only performed the functions of a prophet, but also those of a king and leader of the people and those of a priest, interceding for the people before God; the same happened with Moses. Already in Jesus' time, the priest also had the function of a physician, by being able to declare whether someone was cured of leprosy or not, in order to be integrated back into society. (Matthew 8:4)
“Religion is what makes the poor not kill the rich.” Napoleon Bonaparte
"If God did not exist everything would be permitted." Dostoyevsky
Atheists would not recognize the truth of this first statement coming from someone as unreligious as Bonaparte, who ironically gives religion the status of a police officer that is more effective than the real ones, because people are more afraid of hell or eternal death than of temporal suffering and dying.
Atheists will argue that there is an ethics that needs not be based on religion, but reality, however, seems to point to the fact that if human beings were one day scientifically certain that there is no God or life after death, the boundaries between good and evil would blur. The idea that good leads to Heaven and evil to Hell, is implanted in the collective unconscious of humanity.
If this were to disappear, if in the collective unconscious or conscious this idea was not present, surely 1% of humanity could not have more wealth than the remaining 99%, as is the case today. Lucky for the rich that more than 80% of humanity believes in the existence of God and life beyond death. It is their greatest guarantee that the status quo is maintained. If this was not so, there would be no law, no police and no army that could contain the fury of the poor. So, Napoleon was right in his own way…
In every age, in all places where human beings have lived, the religious phenomenon was born through spontaneous generation: where there are human beings, there is culture as a way of understanding and living life, and there is religion as a way of answering questions that cannot be answered by science. In this sense, science has conquered ground from religion; but can it completely nullify it?
Secularism or the death of God has made us good consumers, but bad citizens, individualists lacking solidarity and empathy with human pain, because it was religion that brought us together in community as children of the same Father God. Without God, nothing unites us as human beings, and everything becomes permissible, as Dostoyevsky says. There is no social ethic that is founded on itself without the foundation in God.
Agnostics are not interested in religion because it is not possible to know God; God cannot be known by the scientific method because he is a person, and people are not the object of science either. People are not known by those who do not love them. To know a person without loving him, without getting involved with him, without making oneself known in return, would be to manipulate him, just as the scientific method does to things.
On the other hand, mystery involves both religion and science. In each and every science there are known matters and unknown matters; that is why one continues to investigate and research to unravel them. One does not know everything about biology, physics, chemistry. The more one knows, the more there is to know. That is why mystery involves both religion and science.
But religion, depending on the answers it gives us to the fundamental questions, also shapes our lives, it tells us how we should or should not live. On this matter, science also has no opinion, nor does it tell us what is the meaning of life or how we should live it.
Religion, culture and development
Every culture has its own way of conceptualizing God; hence the fact that there are various religions. In addition to the cultural factor, the diversity of religions has also to do with the level of development or progress.
With a rampant rate of globalization that aims to put all men in contact with each other, what counts most is no longer the diversity of cultures, but the level of development. More than western or eastern culture, we speak of north and south. There is only one model of development, just as there is only one human nature. More than diversity of cultures, there are developed peoples, less developed peoples and primitive peoples.
Development has been connotated with the Western world, but I would connote it with human nature. There is no alternative development model to the so-called Western one. The East (China and Japan) does not present an alternative development model to that of the West because there is just no other alternative.
There is no development model that does not include the steam engine, electricity, propulsion engines, trains, airplanes, cars, television, radio, telephone, computer, Internet, paper, newspapers, books, schools, universities... The presence or absence of these and many other elements defines the level of development of a people, and this level of development influences people's lives more than cultural nuances.
For example, the writings of Chinese and other Asian peoples are not different from the writing of western peoples because of a cultural factor, but because of a development factor. All writings began in a pictorial form, that is, by representing things by drawing a picture of them. The Egyptian hieroglyphics and the cuneiform writing of Sumer and Mesopotamia are pictorial ancestors of the Greek and Roman alphabets that are in use in the Western world today. As far as writing is concerned, the alphabet is more developed than pictorial writing, because it is simpler in the computer age and because it makes speech more fluid among a greater diversity of concepts and words.
Just as there is a scientific, technical and human development or progress, there is also a progress or development in the field of religion, that is, the conceptualization of God and the experience of innate religious feeling in human beings.
Animism
It is the first conceptualization of the divine. Our ancestors lived in the belief that everything was animated; both material objects, animals, plants, rivers, rocks, etc., such as natural phenomena, thunder, lightning, wind, rain, etc. and even the universe itself, possessed a soul, that is, spiritual or supernatural qualities, meanings or powers.
In Portugal there is a much-repeated phrase that tells of this time period, "In the time when animals could talk". It is not that such a time ever existed, but the belief that animals spoke, had a soul and a personality did exist.
The ancient religions belong to this category; animism still exists today, but only in peoples who somehow live separated from global civilization like the aborigines of Australia, the indigenous peoples of North America, as well as the isolated people in the Amazon and certain African tribes.
Witchcraft, New Age, magic and so many other superstitions are remnants of animism or new expressions of it in Western society. The granting of spiritual power to certain objects such as the charm, the horseshoe, the rabbit’s foot, etc., are modern remnants of animism that today are nothing more than superstitions.
Polytheism
As we said, as the human being got to know and dominate his environment, the latter materialized. All the realities that the human being knows, controls and dominates, these lose their soul, their power, in some way; this passes to or is absorbed by the inventive spirit of the human being. In this way, the sphere of the material has increased, and the sphere of the spiritual has decreased. What human beings dominate ceases to have power over them, above all, it ceases to have spiritual power, to become a controllable material good.
With progress, human beings have managed to dominate many realities, but not all; those that still resisted being mastered acquired the nature of deities. Animism is succeeded by polytheism, the belief that the main realities, powers and forces of nature are dominated by a god. In effect there is a god for each reality, being the lord of that same reality: Venus, the goddess of love, Mars, the god of war, Neptune, the god of the sea, Cronos, the god of time... Polytheism still exists today in certain religions such as Hinduism.
Absolute monotheism
The prehistory of monotheism happens when human beings group all these gods together and give them a leader – Zeus in the Greek mythology and Jupiter in the Roman. From here to monotheism is just one step forward. The first human being to proclaim that there was only one god was an Egyptian pharaoh named Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV, who reigned in Egypt in the 14th century BC, long before the Greek and Roman cultures.
Sedentary peoples tend to be polytheists; nomadic peoples, on the contrary, are monotheistic. The Turkana, a nomadic people of northern Kenya, have the same word to designate Heaven and God. The Mongols, the Turks and the Tatars all worshipped a common god called Tengri, the god of the blue sky.
From here to intuiting that God is a spiritual being was just a short step taken by the Jews, who were also nomads. For them, God was spiritual and was everywhere, inside our minds and especially in our hearts, at all times and all places. He was a personal being because he was a God of people, of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. They also sensed that he was a creator God of everything and everyone. Today, absolute monotheists are therefore the Jews and the Muslims.
Trinitarian monotheism
It is the Christian version of monotheism or, in the age of relativity theory, it is the relativization of the absolute monotheism of the Jews and the Muslims. If man was created in the image and likeness of God, and God is love, love implies a relationship of at least two people; the objective of married life or a relationship, is not two people looking at each other, but the two looking in the same direction, that oftentimes takes the shape or modality of a child but could be some other human goal. So, neither Love or God are “mono" nor "stereo", but three-dimensional.
This God who is a community of love created man in his own image and likeness, so that human beings too are one and triune, and is called to be a community of love; to the Trinity of God corresponds a human trinity.
The human person is free, autonomous, indivisible and independent, and yet he is not self-explanatory, he needs two other persons: his father and his mother, with whom he forms a triangle. Father, mother, child are the only categories of human life; every human being always belongs to two of them.
A man is not a father without having a wife and a child; a woman is not a mother without having a husband and a child, every human being is the child of a father and a mother; there are no single mothers. The Trinity consists in that one individual does not exist alone but coexists with two others; the existence of one always implies the existence of two others, with whom he has affective ties, forming a triangle of love.
Atheism
For atheism, there is no God apart from the universe or in the universe. It claims that the physical universe is all that exists. Everything is self-sufficient matter. Karl Marx’s philosophy on Feuerbach’s thoughts – on the part of philosophy as to his dialectical materialism and on the part of economics as to his historical materialism. Another atheist exponent on the part of psychology was Sigmund Freud.
Believers cannot scientifically prove the existence of God; non-believers cannot scientifically prove his non-existence either. Hence atheism is the belief in the non-existence of God. A belief that goes against the innate religious feeling in human beings.
This religious feeling is somehow referred to by the joke that says: the man is a communist until he becomes rich, a feminist until he gets married and an atheist until the plane starts dropping from the sky. There is also the one who conceives himself as an atheist because it is fashionable and because he has not yet adapted his vocabulary to his new belief, goes so far as to say, "I'm an atheist, thank God”.
Nihilism
Where do I come from, where am I going, and what is the meaning of life, are the three questions that every human being asks himself when, at 6 or 7 years, he reaches self-consciousness, that is, he knows himself as a person. If we come out from nothing and go to nothing, as atheists say, what meaning does life have? Can something that begins in nothing and ends in nothing have any meaning at all? In this sense, nihilism is a natural fruit or product of atheism.
Without a future, the present is nauseating, however pleasant it may be. This is what Sartre experienced, Nietzsche before him and Camus after him: "if you come from nothing, there is no Faith, if you go to nothing, there is no Hope, the most certain is that there is no Charity, so life lacks meaning, it is nauseating.” In the face of this, you either commit suicide like Nietzsche, or you overindulge in the pleasures of the material world and die from some kind of overdose, or you become a philanthropist and enjoy the joy that comes from the good you do for others, because there is more joy in giving than in receiving.
Agnosticism
Since it is not possible to know God, or know him fully, the agnostic, as we have said already, is not interested in the subject, he sets it aside. However, as we have also said, it is not only God who is half shrouded in mystery, so is all sciences. Therefore, this attitude of a-gnosis, that is, of denying the knowledge applied to the sciences, would paralyze scientific progress because it would paralyze research. Since I can't know everything about biology, physics and chemistry, I'm not interested, I don't want to know them at all.
I suspect, on the other hand, that this attitude, from the most human point of view, is that of avoiding answering the three fundamental questions of the human being: where I come from, where am I going and what is the meaning of life, to avoid falling into nihilism. In other words, the attitude of an ostrich that, seeing danger, hides its head in the sand.
Hard evidence of God's existence
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:17-22
To paraphrase St. Paul, if Christ did not resurrect, if there is no God or life beyond death, we are the most wretched of all living beings inhabiting this planet. The evolution from non-consciousness to consciousness, or as Karl Marx puts it, we are the moment when nature gains consciousness of itself, would be meaningless. What did we gain consciousness for?
So that we can be aware of our misery? So that, unlike other living beings, we know that one day we're going to die? To feel sadness whenever we have another birthday and see how our strength is waning, our external beauty is disappearing and diseases gaining ground? At least other living beings are spared this suffering, because they do not know that they are going to die or even that they exist, because they are not conscious of self.
What is the point of having a choice? So that we can fall into a thousand and one traps and make our lives a living hell? At least other living beings are always happy, they don't have the ability to ruin their own lives and become unhappy.
And what's all the work and effort for if we were all end up the same way? And if the end of human beings is the same as that of a flea or a cockroach, in what way can a human being be superior to these living beings? Unless he is superior in suffering, in sadness and in despair if, in fact, the end for all is nothing.
If there is thirst, there must be water; otherwise, there would be no thirst. All the experiences of those who have been between life and death, between here and beyond, speak of a light, of an immense happiness. No one, so far, has spoken of nothingness, of emptiness, of ceasing to exist.
According to Pascal's famous argument or wager, let us suppose that two friends - one atheist and one religious - bet a sum of money on whether or not God and life beyond death exist. The atheist bets that God does not exist, the religious bets that he does. At the death of the two men, if the atheist wins the bet, that is, if there is nothing beyond death, he won’t be able to collect the prize, he won’t even know that he has won and that the religious has lost.
If, on the other hand, there is life beyond death and God sustains it, the religious has gained this eternal life and the atheist has lost it. We conclude that whoever believes has everything to gain and nothing to lose; whoever does not believe has everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Conclusion – The concepts of religion and worldview encompass each other. Every worldview has a religion or an anti-religion, and every religion has a worldview.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
