Durkheim
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Durkheim
Totemic Forces in Modern Religious Belief
The fundamental theorems of Durkheim can help to explain the foundations of all the worlds’ religions. Emile Durkheim was born in France in 1858 and died of a stroke during 1917. His father was a rabbi but he became an agnostic. He studied philosophy and history and wrote the book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).
He divided all societal relationships into two components: The sacred and the profane. He refers to the sacred as revolving around a totemic symbol unique to that society or community. The profane are actions, ideas, or behaviors specific to individuals and their needs. A totem is a symbol of an animal or object that lends credence to a cultures self image. Durkheim’s unique contribution to philosophy is his idea that the totem is the foundation of all religions. To Durkheim, it is not the totemic animal or object that is fundamental but the societies abstract symbol of the totemic animal or objects that is the essence of the sacred. Durkheim studied aboriginal cultures in the Australian Outback. He derived his principals from those observations and the observations of anthropologists who preceded him. Previous theorist’s held that people came to believe in God by trying to describe the objects and events of nature. That was the naturism theory of Frederick Max Muller.[1] E.B. Tyler theorized that Gods developed out of the idea of the soul. Durkheim felt that societies are not evolving in an evolutionary sense but can be examined, as they exist today to find the truths about their essential nature. The totems exist as well in a civilized society as well as the tribal.
In tribal cultures, specific totemic belief systems define the nature of relationships within that culture. For example, if a particular aboriginal clan accepts the white cockatoo as its Totem, members of this clan cannot eat the cockatoo or kill it except for religious purposes. Nobody in the clan would ever think...
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