What is a religion? (rituals, morals, Creator, beliefs, choices)

[Runt]

Originally Posted by summia

But I hav some different Ifo about Weber's approach like

1)Although Dahrendorf goes on to note the ambiguities in Weber's writings between factual analysis and value-influenced pronouncements, he stops short of offering an explanation for them other than to say that Weber, being human, could not always live with his own demands for objectivity.

I think I would need to see this quote in its fuller context to be able to address it correctly, but I will attempt to do so anyway.

Most explanations of religion are either reductionist or anti-reductionist. Reductionist explanations attempt to reduce religion to its component parts. Marx reduced religion to economics, Frazer and Tylor to intellectualism, Freud and Jung to psychology, Durkheim to sociology, and Malinowski to emotionalism. Anti-reductionist explanations, on the other hand, do not attempt to explain religion through the lens of other fields or reduce it to its component parts. Instead, anti-reductionist explanations are concerned with meaning.

Weber was an anti-reductionist, but he was much more moderate than, say, Eliade. He argued against the purely causal explanations of religion offered by his reductionist contemporaries, believing religion was not always the end result of some other underlying process, but could sometimes be the catalyst for a process. However, he did not rule out causal explanations entirely, and indeed occassionally offered them himself, much to the chagrin of his critics, who seemed to want him to see things as much more black and white, much more static rather than dynamic. So yes, I think it is fair to say that Weber DID occassionally flit back and forth between what Dahrendorf refers to as "factual analysis and value-influenced pronouncements", because he was an anti-reductionist who nevertheless occassionally provided a causual explanation here and there, not as the only explanation for religion, but as potentially one among many different explanations.

Originally Posted by summia

2)
Did Weber believe that, even though facts are one thing and values another, social and economic facts could be evaluated without the analysis being influenced by values?

No... I don't believe Weber attempted to remove "value" from the picture at all.

Originally Posted by summia

And It also go though my scense that why the experience of the a person is fit for religion? If he may or may not be at mistake! means at the risk. Can religion be taken at the risk?
Risk means, not sure of protection after death!

Well yes. Revelation is a tricky business. An individual who supposedly receives a revelation from the divine may have had a genuine revelation. He may have had a genuine revelation and then misunderstood it. He may have had a dream or a hallucination and not a genuine revelation. We would all like to believe that religions are based on spiritual truth, and some may indeed be, but this does not mean that they all are.