After looking at religion and culture and their influences on the world, I was interested on how they influenced smaller groups of people because in smaller groups these aspects of life would have a much more personal and deeper meaning to each individual. I realized through the help of a few articles that often times when you are faithful, one of your first senses of community is through your place of worship. Culture can also create communities but they would never compare to religious communities. In a cultural community you may not all believe in some of the same things, while in a religious community you all roughly have the same beliefs, so it's easier to talk about much deeper topics and you can feel more comfortable sharing different experiences with the people you share that religious community with. This is discussed in the article "What role do religion and spirituality play in mental health" by Kenneth I. Pargament, Phd. Pargament is a leading expert in religion and spirituality, he has made points on how religious or faithful people deal with coping situations like a death of a family member or friend. Pargament says "People can draw on many religious and spiritual resources that have been tied to better adjustment in times of crisis. These positive religious coping methods include spiritual support from God or a higher power, rituals to facilitate life transitions, spiritual forgiveness, support from a religious institution or clergy and reframing a stressful situation into a larger, more benevolent system of meaning.", this religious support could never compare to cultural support. One of the main reasons the two support systems could never been the same is because of that sense of community. This is one way I have found religion to be clearly different from culture because no culture will ever have a higher power that you are able to worship and have a relationship with. Having a faith and practicing religion also provides us with answers to the questions like "Why me?", "Why did this happen?", "Why does it have to be this way?" . Writer L. Ron Hubbard also explains this topic further in his article "Religious influences in society", he gets more descriptive when he talks about how the culture and the cultural community you live in can bring you down, while a religious community can only help you build your faith with a higher figure. Hubbard's article says " Your sense of community occurs by reason of mutual experience with others. Where the religious sense of community and with it real trust and integrity can be destroyed then that society is like a sand castle unable to defend itself against the inexorable sea.", here Hubbard uses a simile, so that we can fully understand that the culture we choose to live in can destroy us and we have little hope turning to our daily lives culture when coping with a traumatic experience. I believe that there is a beauty in all of our struggles with culture, because then it challenges all of us to be open to living our life for someone or something greater than ourselves and religion and religious communities give us the opportunity to start or grow our faith so when we are coping or grieving we can turn to those religious communities for support. Culture also challenges us to be religious and to be faithful so we are able to deal with those coping situations so that we are able to get back to our daily life. On a much deeper and individualistic view culture can bring us down throughout our life, but only to challenge us with the thought of practicing religion and growing our faith in figure that is bigger and better than ourselves to make us whole again.
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AuthorJessica is a junior at Metea Valley, who plays soccer and basketball. She is also very curious about religion and culture in the world today. |