Final Paper

In a short final paper of approximately 4-5 pages (~1,000 words), use these three films to discuss, illustrate, and analyze some of the main features of religion in an age of globalization. A strong paper will go beyond simply describing religion as it is portrayed in the films, and will bring to bear analytical concepts from our semester together studying world religions.

In an era of globalization, religion has been transformed and studied from different sets of approaches using different sets of analytical tools. In this paper, I will use tools learned throughout the Introduction to World Religions course and apply them in order to analyze and discuss three films, which we watched in the class, namely, “Crazy Wisdom”, “Atheism: A brief history of Disbelief” and “Hosay Trinidad”. Those films may seem strange for people who did not study religion, but if to see those films through the lenses of religion scholar, it is easy to interpret their actions and follow their ideas.

Firstly, I want to start with the film which is about Chogyam Trungpa, whose religious movement in the West can be considered as a perfect example of religious globalization in the 20th century. His main aim was to transfer knowledge of Tibet to the westerners. Moreover, his mission was about the notion of enlightenment and not religious, but secular enlightenment. He followed the teaching called “Crazy Wisdom”; consequently, he cardinally changed the opinions of people who believed how enlightened teacher should behave. We can analyze his actions from Ninian Smart`s “The Social and Institutional Dimension”. Because, as a consequence of damage delivered by materialism, he wanted to form new type of society, to bring together the best ideas of the East and the ...

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...ic ideas. Surprisingly to me, the film extends the idea that religious belief is strongly correlated with authority, power and patriotism, and he concludes that U.S. is very comfortable place for non-believers, or atheists. Moreover, we can analyze Miller`s atheistic approach from the Smart`s perspective, as “The Doctrinal and Philosophical Dimension”, because this dimension stresses attention on the role of scriptures about some doctrines and discusses speculation about God`s relationship with people.

In this paper, I have introduced religious globalization in three ways, in the first example, spread of religious ideas as a result of individual religious organization, in the second case, appearance of new features of religious beliefs as a result of rituals, in the third case, globalization of religion in the context of change in the human support of the religion.