In this excerpt, Smart attempts to identify a set of characteristics or features common to religion. He does this instead of defining the concept 'religion' because, "...the search for essence ends up in vagueness" (p. 3). There does seem to be some value in identifying some common features of actual religions, because it could help us distinguish religions from other forms of human activity. The features he specifies are: ritual, emotion, narrative, doctrine, ethical, institutional, and material. Though any particular religion may be limited in one or more of these features, their common presence is sufficient to specify something as a religion (p. 8).
This sort of account seems to fit in well with Ninian's general approach to religion. I found an interview he did (http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/smart.html) entitled the "The Future of Religion." In it, he states his opinion that the general trend in religion is in the direction of syncretism (the merging of different religions). The kind of account he gives, which diminishes the significance of differences in any of the specified features in favor of their common presence in religions, certainly lends itself to syncretism. One question I have is about the vagueness that remains in this account. While it certainly seems more concrete than some abstract definition of religion as a concept, the fact that his definition applies, as he demonstrates (p. 8ff), to things like nationalism or (much less convincingly imho) marxism makes it harder to employ his account as a tool to understand the specificity of religion. We surely can use religion as a metaphor to understand nationalism, but if nationalism is a religion, than we are talking about something quite different than most people understand as religion.
This sort of account seems to fit in well with Ninian's general approach to religion. I found an interview he did (http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/smart.html) entitled the "The Future of Religion." In it, he states his opinion that the general trend in religion is in the direction of syncretism (the merging of different religions). The kind of account he gives, which diminishes the significance of differences in any of the specified features in favor of their common presence in religions, certainly lends itself to syncretism. One question I have is about the vagueness that remains in this account. While it certainly seems more concrete than some abstract definition of religion as a concept, the fact that his definition applies, as he demonstrates (p. 8ff), to things like nationalism or (much less convincingly imho) marxism makes it harder to employ his account as a tool to understand the specificity of religion. We surely can use religion as a metaphor to understand nationalism, but if nationalism is a religion, than we are talking about something quite different than most people understand as religion.
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