Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:

Answer three (3) questions in essay form.  Each essay should be at least two (2) pages in length, double-spaced, 12 pt. font.  The total length of the exam should be 6-8 pages.  To answer these questions it is necessary that you have done the ready up to week 7 (Pals, Nigosian, Livingston, and the Bhagavad Gita).  The essays should be submitted as one submission (not three separate submissions) to Turnitin assignments in Blackboard, no later than SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8TH, 2013.

1.  E. B. Tylor and to some degree James Frazer saw primitive religion as humankind’s earliest attempt to “explain” reality, both natural and human (that is, make sense of it), very much like modern science attempts to explain the workings of the physical universe.  How, for example, Hinduism and Buddhism attempt to explain reality and the human condition?  Do these religious “explanations” still illuminate aspects of reality and the human condition despite the advances of the modern world, or are they as obsolete (useless and irrelevant) today, as Tylor and Frazer believed them to be?  

2.  Buddhism is essentially an atheistic religion.  And yet it is one of the major religions in the world today.  How can Buddhism be used to illustrate Durkheim’s and Geertz’s point that religion is really not about “God,” but  about “us,” that is, about human society and culture.  In order words, in what sense would it be true to say that religion will not go away or disappear (as the radical Enlightenment and Marx believed it should and eventually would) because it is an inalienable aspect or dimension of the human?  

3.  Ritual and sacrifice was found to be an essential feature of the Hindu religion, and as we saw, of Western religions like Christianity and Judaism.  Why is ritual so central to a religion, and what role does it play in religion?  A central part of the ritual is sacrifice, with an emphasis on the power of the blood of the sacrificed to bring about a desired transformation in or influence upon the God (or gods) to whom the sacrifice is offered.  From the examples discussed in class, why does sacrifice have so much power?

4.  Discuss Marx’s theses that religion is a major obstacle to the emancipation of humanity from superstition and oppression, that religion has been a major force in legitimizing and justifying the conquest of subjugation of peoples in the name of their god and religion.  Is Marx’s critique of religion for the most part correct, partially correct, or too simplistic (black and white) to be right?

5.  The type of religion represented by the Upanishads and Buddhism is very different from the type of religion we encountered in the Vedas and later the Bhagavad Gita (and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).  In particular their conception of the divine or absolute reality and salvation are quite different.  Explain those differences.

6.  The Bhagavad Gita is one of the greatest synthesis in the history of religions.  Explain how the way it reconciles the different paths to salvation (Karma/Action, Jñana/Knowledge, and Bhakti/Devotion or faith in God) offered, respectively, by the Vedas (action in the world), the Upanishads (knowledge of Brahman or the Absolute), and the Gita (devotion or faith in a personal, loving and savior God who takes on human form to make his message available to us humans) represents either one of the greatest spiritual achievements, or, as Marx would say, the kind of deceptive and manipulative attempt to keep a decadent and dying religion alive for the benefit of the upper Hindu priestly and warrior classes who saw their power and influence over the masses decline and who needed to reinvent themselves and their religion to secure and prolong their power and control over the people.  Defend one of these interpretations.