Christianity

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 426.

TEXT 2.

1. Work in groups. Choose a religion you are interested in and read the information below. Read the description of a religion in order to find out more about it and answer the following questions.

· What are believers called?

· What do they believe?

· What is the name of a holy place?

· What special customs or traditions are there?

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament writings of his early followers. It is the world's largest religion, with an estimated 2.1 billion adherents, or about one-third of the total world population. It shares with Judaism the Hebrew Scriptures (called the Old Testament by Christians), and is sometimes called an Abrahamic religion, along with Judaism and Islam.

Christianity encompasses numerous religious traditions that widely vary by culture and place, as well as many diverse beliefs and sects. Since the Reformation, Christianity is usually represented as being divided into three main branches:

1. Catholicism, or the Roman Catholic Church (including Eastern Catholics)--the largest coherent group, with over one billion baptized members;

2. Eastern Christianity (includes the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Assyrian Church of the East) -- networks of bishops and patriarchs in communion with one another, with over two hundred million baptized members;

3. Protestantism (including Anglicanism, Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Anabaptist, Evangelicalism, Charismatics and Pentecostalism)--numerous denominations and schools of thought, with just over five hundred million members altogether.

This leaves 158 million Independents (unaffiliated with the major streams of Christianity), as well as 31.7 million belonging to other groups with less clear status (including Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons).

These broad divisions are not equally uniform. On the contrary, some branches encompass vast disagreements, and in other cases the division overlooks existing sympathies. But this is the convenient standard overview of distinctions, especially as Christianity has been viewed in the Western world.

Christians have always viewed Christianity as the fulfillment and successor of Judaism, and Christianity carried forward much of the doctrine and many of the practices from the Hebrew faith, including a form of monotheism, the belief in a Messiah or "anointed one"—Christ from the Greek Christós (Χριστος)—spoken of in prophecies, many moral precepts, certain forms of worship (such as prayer, and reading from sacred texts), a priesthood (although most Protestants assert the "priesthood of all believers" is the only valid priesthood today), and the idea that worship on Earth is modeled on worship in Heaven.

The central belief of Christianity is that by faith in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus, individuals are saved from death – both spiritual and physical – by redemption from their sins (i.e., faults, misdeeds, disobedience, rebellion against God, "spiritual illness", the latter especially in Eastern Christianity). Through God's grace, by faith and repentance, men and women are reconciled to God through forgiveness and by sanctification or theosis to, after death, find their place with God in Heaven, and, at the end of time, to be resurrected from the dead, to die no more.

Crucial beliefs in Christian teaching are Jesus' incarnation, atonement, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead to redeem humankind from sin and death; and the belief that the New Testament is a part of the Bible. Many Christians today (and traditionally even more) also hold to supersessionism, the belief that Christianity is the fulfillment of Biblical Judaism.

The emphasis on God the Father giving his son, or the Son (who is God) becoming incarnate for the sake of humanity, is an essential difference between Christianity and most other religions, where the emphasis is instead placed solely on humans working for salvation.

2. Buddhism

Buddhism is a philosophy based on the teachings of the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, a prince of the Shakyas, whose lifetime is traditionally given as 566 to 486 BCE. It had subsequently been accepted by many as a religion. Buddhism gradually spread from India throughout Asia to Central Asia, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Southeast Asia, as well as to East Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan.

With approximately 360 million followers, Buddhism is considered a major world religion.

The aim of Buddhist practice is to end the suffering of cyclic existence by awakening the practitioner to the realization of true reality, the achievement of liberation (nirvana). To achieve this, one should purify and train the mind and act according to the laws of karma: perform negative actions, and negative results will follow, and vice versa. Buddhist morality is underpinned by the principles of harmlessness and moderation. Mental training focuses on moral discipline (sila), meditative concentration (samadhi), and wisdom (prajñā).

While Buddhism does not deny the existence of supernatural beings (indeed, many are discussed in Buddhist scripture), it does not ascribe power for creation, salvation or judgment to them. Like humans, they are regarded as having the power to affect worldly events, and so some Buddhist schools associate with them via ritual.

The Buddha taught that life was dissatisfactory because of craving, but that this condition was curable by following the Eightfold Path. This teaching is called the Four Noble Truths:

· Dukkha: All worldly life is unsatisfactory, disjointed, containing suffering.

· Samudaya: There is a cause of suffering, which is attachment or desire (tanha) rooted in ignorance.

· Nirodha: There is an end of suffering, which is Nirvana.

· Maggo: There is a path that leads out of suffering, known as the Noble Eightfold Path.

In order to fully understand the noble truths and investigate whether they were in fact true, Buddha recommended that a certain lifestyle or path be followed which consists of:

· Right Understanding

· Right Thought

· Right Speech

· Right Action

· Right Livelihood

· Right Effort

· Right Mindfulness

· Right Concentration

The Eightfold Path essentially consists of meditation, following the precepts, and cultivating the positive converse of the precepts (e.g. benefiting living beings is the converse of the first precept of harmlessness). The Path may also be thought of as a way of developing śīla, meaning mental and moral discipline.

Buddhists undertake certain precepts as aids on the path to coming into contact with ultimate reality. Hence, they are also known as Training rules. Laypeople generally undertake (at least one of) five precepts. The Five Precepts are not given in the form of commands such as "thou shalt not ...", but rather are promises to oneself: "I will (try) to...".

· The five precepts are:

· To refrain from harming living creatures (killing).

· To refrain from taking that which is not freely given (stealing).

· To refrain from sexual misconduct.

· To refrain from incorrect speech (lying, harsh language, slander, idle chit-chat).

· To refrain from intoxicants which lead to loss of mindfulness.

This difference stems from the rationale behind them. While other religions institutes commandments and is based on the wishes or commands of a divine being, Buddhist precepts are based more on common sense that the Buddha highlights to Buddhists. Just as we would not want to be killed, others, cherishing their own life would not want to be killed. Hence we should not engage in harming or killing others. The same rationale applies to the latter 3 precepts.

The other distinguishing feature of the Buddhist precepts is that they are wider-ranging in implication than the "commandments" of some other religions. The first precept, against killing, for example, forbids the killing of animals as well as humans.