Response paper to Mircea Eliade: The Quest; History and Meaning in Religion (Theories of Religion and Social)
Eliade tried
to describe the “origin” of religion by tracing it back from the archaic
religion. after his tracing back, he argued that the reality of religion
contains two sides, sacred and profane. The scared points the eternal and
supernatural entity beyond this world supremely and perfectly. In other hand,
profane points the reality in man being as human, a worldly means that have
relationship with material thing in the world.
The
separation between sacred and profane raises minimally two problems. The first
about how firstly human thinks about whether this is profane or sacred. This is
not clearly told in Eliade’s explanation about the archaic religion. When
people made a boat with certain rules, the question is when they made their
rules about that? Eliade has no clear explanation in this case. He just
described that everything occurred as a given by nature, no intentionally made
by human being. It is important because from this we can learn why people tend
to separate between sacred and profane.
The second
question is about the separation itself. The sacred and profane as a clear
separation is a scientific work. It does not occur much in the reality. Even
though there are any tight separation in the society, this is only occurs in
official activity and symbols of religion such as praying, mosque, temple, etc.
The reality is more talking about the unity between sacred and profane. Simply
talking, there is no clear separation between sacred and profane in the daily
activity of people. For instance, the last issue in Indonesia tried the
implementation of Social piety. This term social piety implies all every action
of people in social activities must be considered as worship to goodness or
God. This requires that there is no separation between sacred and profane.
Every action is a sacred, because contains the relationship between human and
their God.
The problem
of Eliade’s explanation about religion is about describing religion with
historical view. He did not give much space for individual experience in
determining the concept of religion. Such as Durkheimian scholar, he implies
his explanation from social factor and how people in social interaction make
agreement and admission of their opinion and problem.
Komentar
Posting Komentar
Thanks for your comment. God bless you always. :)