ELE - Contexts
Belief Systems
Extension Activities:
Your Mission:
- Retrace the origins of belief systems and religions
- Discuss the proposition that belief systems and religions will always exist
- Explain how some super-human power and intelligience, whether unseen and anabstract spirit provide laws for humanity to live by as well as live in 'harmony'.
- Draw up a list of your own most important beliefs, both religious and non-religious, and trace their origins.
Resources
Check out these links to help
Religions and Belief Systems in Asia
Counterclockwise from the North Pole: Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism
Belief system: Is an organised way of trying to explain the world around us. It is something that distinguishes human beings, and becomes an integral part of culture.
Belief systems can be classified into two basic flavours: science and religion.
What are the distinctions between a science and a religion?
What are Belief Systems?
An understanding of belief systems is modified by a person's experience of life. [In this context is a source of meaing derived from complex experiences, attitudes, convictions, ideas, emtions, images, rituals symbols, and texts.]
Generally speaking - the experience is 'sacred' and that there is a sense of something beyond the ordinary experiences of life. [Stories and practices of a community develop over time and need to be reinterpreted in new cultural situtations as people outside the original goup seek membership].
Such response is perpetuated as a belief system and a way of life [developments of doctrines, moral codes although not arbitrary stand as testimony to the significance of a 'higher being' - and sacred texts bear witness to originating events and traditions].
Outcome:To understand that despite its may failings, Belief Systems still function as a source of hope
Project Question:
Clarify and Explain why humans seek to comprehend the mystery of life
Develop your own area of interest and formulate questions that you want answered and relate to your understanding of Belief Systems. For example
1. the function of religions and belief systems, or
2. are religious rituals less important than religious beliefs
3. or perhaps belief systems offer a way of viewing the world that does not conflict with science
Outcome:
To explore the enduring presence and resilence of belief systems in our society
Project Question:
The phenomenon of belief systems is nothing more than wish fulfilment i.e. people seek to satisfy their desires, and when their cravings are not satisfield in this world they imagine fulfilment in another world - a belief systems, but since belief systems are gounded in illusion its promises therefore are ultimately barren. Discuss
Overview:
A study of Belief Systems in terms of rapid social change offers people a sence of communal identity as they struggle with quesitons of personal meaning and life direction.
Can belief systems therefore be a kind of social cement that unites people through adherence to common values and morals or conversely retard personal and social development when it makes individuals dependent on unjust authority.
This unit of study focuses a study of meaning in an attempt to understand the complexity of the phenomenon of Belief Systems:
- an understanding of a belief system as a way of live
- an undestanding of how belief systems were formulated into stories and sacred writings
- providing opportunities for the students to develop critical understandings of belief systems
- future of belief systems
Students will assessing and evaluating
- the dynamic relationship of people and social and communal structures
- Belief Systems as a source of social transformation, and
- the varieties of Belief Systems evolving from environments where forces and powers are beyond human control
References
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