The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

faith-and-doubt

• All human productions are potentially comprehensible in human terms. The veil of mystification thrown over them by religion prevents such comprehension.

  SCES-RC-073

• Whatever happens, however terrible, makes sense by being related to the ultimate meaning of things—hence the persistent attractiveness of this worldview.

  SCE-RC-100

• The pluralistic situation ipso facto plunges religion into a crisis of credibility—not from mysterious metamorphosis of consciousness, but from empirically available social developments.

  SCES-RC-119

obedience-and-authority

• Religious legitimations ground socially defined reality in ultimate reality 'as such,' giving institutions a semblance of inevitability and durability analogous to the gods themselves.

  SCES-RC-030

• The illiterate peasant who refers to the will of God at a child's death engages in theodicy as much as the learned theologian writing a treatise.

  SCE-RC-048

belonging

• All religious traditions, irrespective of their ecclesiologies, require specific communities for their survival as empirically real.

  SCE-RC-042