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| Neanderthal | A type of prehistoricc man from the middlez Paleolithic age, whose remains were found in a cave in the Neanderthal Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. |
| Cro-Magnom | The term that designates the first group of fully evolved representatives of Homo sapiens, who entered Europe from the Middle East between 42,000 and 30,00 B.C.E. |
| Sacred | Religious term pertains to ultimate reality. |
| Ontological | The nature of being; the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature, the essential properties, and the relations of being. |
| archetypal | Original pattern, or model, from which other things - such as institutions, beliefs, and behavior are pattered. |
| bar-mitzvah | Means Son of the Commandment; applied to a ?Jewish boy on his thriteenth birthday |
| ethnocentric | Assumption that a person's own race or culture is normative or superior to others. |
| Evangelical | Christians of any Protestant faith who place great importnace on a conscious, personal conversion to Christ rather than becoming a Christian through birth or baptism. |
| proselytize | Engaging in the effort to persuade or convince a person from one religion to another. |
| textual criticism | Is a literary critical method that tries to determine whether we are reading the original or most authentic version of a paricular text. |
| doumentary criticism | A type of literary criticism that determines imporant facts such as the authorship or date of a paricular piece of literature. |
| Tripitaka | A Sanskirt word used to designate the Buddhist sacred cannon of writings. |
| historiography | is the study of the history and methodology of the discipline of history |
| Emile Durkheim | s considered by many to be the father of sociology. He believed that religion was primarily a social phenominon |
| Max Weber | He was the author of the Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of capitalism. |
| Sigmund Freud | He believed that religion was a form of nuerosis. |
| Oedipus Complex | The theory of Sigmund Freud that children of an unconscious tendency to be attached to the parent of the opposite sex and show hostility to the other parent. Freud used the to explain social facts including religion. |
| Gordon Alport | Conducted the classic study of religion and prejudice that found that deeply religious people are less likely and not more likely to hold prejudicial views. |
| agnosticism | Doesn't know if their is a God. |
| fideism | Those that belief that faith must preceed reason with regard to the knwoledge of God and that faith alone is incapable in producing the knowledge of God. |
| falsification principle | In order for a statement to be meaningful, this principle demands that the proposer must account fir what might be the case in its falsification. |
| hermeneutics | The art and science of interpretating a text |
| animism | The belief that everything is embued with spirit. |
| totemism | A Totem fish mask from the Orokolo Bay area of New Guinea. Painted bark cloth over rattan frame with … [Credit: Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, England]system of belief in which humans are said to have kinship or a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal or plant. The entity, or totem, is thought to interact with a given kin group or an individual and to serve as their emblem or symbol. |
| amulets | An object, either natural or man-made, believed to be endowed with special powers to protect or bring good fortune |
| Rudolf Otto | German theologian, philosopher, and historian of religion, who exerted worldwide influence through his investigation of man’s experience of the holy. Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy, 1923) is his most important work. |
| axis mundi | The term neans center of the world. It is the point at which, symbolically speaking, the world rotates. |
| imago mundi | The center of the world. |
| reliquaries | A small box, container, or shrine used to hold or exhibit a religious relic, such as the bones of a saint. |
| rabbinic | Things that pertain to Jewish rabbis or teachers, their writings, opinions, and so forth. |
| icon | sacred image |
| mudra | A symbolic gesture or position of the hands in Hinduism and Buddhism; each mudra signifies a mood, vitue, or spiritual quality. |
| Eschatological | Deals with last things. |
| Metaphor | Is a distinctive form of symbolic communication that reveals suprise and openess to some new insight. |
| Parable | It is another distinctive form of religious discourse. It is essentially an extended metaphor. |
| mandala | In Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism, a symbolic diagram used in the performance of sacred rites and as an instrument of meditation. The mandala is basically a representation of the universe, a consecrated area that serves as a receptacle for the gods and as a collection point of universal forces. |
| rites of passage | Rituals that are connected with critical events in the life of individuals. |
| shamans | Is uniquely able to undergo altered states of consciousness and to leave his body and travel to the other world of spirits serving as an intercessor or healer |
| Yom Kippur | Day of Atonement |
| Sacrament | Makes use of of temporal things - words, gestures, objects - for a spiritual purpose; to make manifest the sacred or supernatural. |
| Written Torah | The five books of Moses |
| Four Books and Five Classics | Confucian sacred literature |
| L. Ron Hubbard | Founder of Scientology |
| Great Goddess Gaia | Also known as Mother Nature in Wicca |
| Paeolithic Age | An ancient cultural stage, or level, of human development, characterized by the use of rudimentary chipped stone tools. |
| Neolythic Age | It also called New Stone Age, The large burial mound at Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland. [Credit: Brian Morrison/Tourism Ireland]final stage of cultural evolution or technological development among prehistoric humans. It was characterized by stone tools shaped by polishing or grinding, dependence on domesticated plants or animals, settlement in permanent villages, and the appearance of such crafts as pottery and weaving. The Neolithic followed the Paleolithic Period, or age of chipped-stone tools, and preceded the Bronze Age, or early period of metal tools. |
| Monotheism | The belief in only one God. |
| Polytheism | The belief in many gods. |
| Dualism | The doctrine that the world (or reality) consists of two basic, opposed, and irreducible principles that account for all that exists. It has played an important role in the history of thought and of religion. |
| Pantheism | Doctrine that the universe is God and, conversely, that there is no god apart from the substance, forces, and laws manifested in the universe. |
