Reading Response

Reading Response
     Thompson exhaustively expounds on the many problems associated with defining religion due to its miscellany forms. Substantive research provides that it is this diversity that contributes to different perceptions and interpretations (Eric Sharpen 2006). Today, the world’s renowned religious groups encounter many controversial challenges due to the changing world. In the past years, there has been an efflorescence concern for methodology and theory applied in studying religion, nonetheless, the concern for studying religion gained momentum in the 1970s which led to ‘varied definitions.
According to Badsworth Thompson, the development of theoretical study on religion had its aims, methods, goals and theoretical backgrounds on foundations on polemics and apologetics. The objective of this paper is to examine the aims of religionists of one persuasion or another that explains the origin of religion in order to defend their view. Thompson observed that natural factors are needed in order for religion to grow. This is the reason for competing religious accounts or irreligious justifications. The atrocities caused by religious violence and the growing explanatory power of science led others to adopt a nonreligious stance to try to explain religion in nonreligious terms.
This explanation often had the intention of prompting its theoretical demise. Nonetheless, the polemical inspiration for theories of religion has retreated in many quarters. This retreat has resulted to numerous difficulties to advantageously make a heuristic difference involving humanistic concepts of religion and pious theories of religion. Humanistic suppositions explain religion in regards to humans who constitute or subscribe to these believes. Hence, theories give details of religion in terms religious entity, object, ultimate or force reality (Eric Sharpen 2006).  Aims of this distinction give provisional and complete orientation because of humanistic theories which are used to substantiate on the effects and significance of religion. Freidrich, for instance, argued in identifying religion with a feeling that humans unconsciously are the essential characteristics of human kind outside themselves and redefines them in the form of divine beings. He categorically pines that humanity must overcome its self-induced self-alienation by self-consciously reaffirming its natural self. To this extent, the theorist confirms his humanistic theory ((Eric Sharpen 2006).
      Thompsons’ methods accept the theological anthropology of his forebears' who observed that God endowed humans with an inborn religious intelligence. In his methods of naturalistic anthropology, religious concepts are imitative. The methodology supports that religious studies are not original in instinct or primary impression of nature. This i...