Encyclopedia of Religion

truth”—like everything else—are related but distinct, the systematic formulation of how they were to be defined and related beca ...

enth and eighth centuries CE, where it was known as the Hosso ̄ school. The Chinese Maha ̄ya ̄na Buddhists, during the fifth and ...

of ultimate reality, human nature, and religious awareness. Likewise, the empty apprehension of oneself that is best manifested ...

The word supernatural, however, left the confines of the schools and began to lose its precise technical meaning. It be- came as ...

Christians were confident that God and nature were as one, or that dogma and reason fully agreed. The idea that belief in the su ...

leopard fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays? Among contem- poraries, not everyone who reads horoscopes will profess be- lief in them ...

SEE ALSO Holy, Idea of the; Sacred and the Profane, The; Transcendence and Immanence. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bellah, Robert N. Beyond Beli ...

mons. Such false beliefs did not deserve the name of religion, for, as Lactantius explained, “religion is the worship of the tru ...

superstitious because of the “inappropriate manner” in which they offered worship to God. The Catholic humanist reformer Desider ...

schichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aber- glaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1979). The medieval co ...

If supreme beings know all things in the world and even think them into existence, such knowledge is not reciprocal. Knowing eve ...

expressing themselves through celestial elements such as the stars and the rains, these associations are extended. Primordiality ...

In South America, too, there is no shortage of supreme beings who are creators. Among them one may mention Pelepelewa, god of th ...

animals, the sun, the moon, and the thunder. He then with- drew to the twelfth heaven. Nonetheless, he looks over human activiti ...

to oaths, as witness to what is. In northwestern Sumatra, among the Batak peoples, reference is made to Debata. When he smiles, ...

and god of hurricanes. He unleashes the rains and assures fer- tility for animals, crops, and humans. In Iran, the meteoro- logi ...

of the supreme being and other spirits. The area in which this secret society flourished coincides roughly with the area in whic ...

of scholars interested themselves in one or another specific aspect of the problem and contributed to the understanding of supre ...

The most popular of these theories was that of animism, set forth by E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture: Researches into the Devel ...

of shared religious beliefs stemming from the earlier histori- cal stratum that he called the religion of Archaic Pygmy Cul- tur ...