Complete the text using the words below.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 569.

determine, enterprise, linguistics, anthropologist, study of religion, psychologist conjectures

Origin of religion - subject within the study of religions. The quest for the origin of religion was a popular academic ________ at the beginning of the 20th century and is to be seen in the works of the economist and historian Karl Marx, of the sociologist Emile Durkheim, and of the ________ Sigmund Freud. This quest is directly related to the quest for the meaning of religion, - that is, if we can ________ the origin of religion we might be able to determine its meaning. Thus, for Freud, in the beginning was "the deed" - religion grew out of experiences surrounding certain primal actions. For Durkheim it was the appearance of the "collective conscience," as society itself was deified in symbolic, totemic form. For the ________ sir Edward Burnett Tylor the origin of religion was to be found in the first human attempts to explain experience. For other scholars mysticism was the origin, indeed the very essence, of religion.

Two counterarguments seek to put an end to the quest for origins. The first argues from the basis that the quest is sheer conjecture: none of these claims can ever hope to be proven. The second argues from linguistic grounds: the meaning of religion, like the meaning of language, cannot be explained by a study of its history or origin, even if we could discover them. That is, to know the meaning of English is to know something other than its history or origin. Nevertheless, in the late 20th century _______ concerning the origin once again came to the fore in the ______ of _______, as they did in ______.