5.3 Scholarly definitions of religion Scholars offer us many different definitions of religion, but these definitions tend to be of two types. The first type is known as a substantive definition: that is, a definition that tells us what kind of thing religion is by pointing to its distinguishing characteristic – usually its beliefs and/or practices. We can find an example of a substantive definition of religion in my summary of the definitions found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Think again about d. Acc
5.2 The ‘answer’ in your dictionary Please now look at the definition of ‘religion’ given in your dictionary. Do you think that the definition is going to help you when deciding what is or is not religion? Please give 4.4 Religion and social policy Understanding religious beliefs and practices and what we mean by ‘religion’ is not merely of academic interest. It is often bound up with social policy and so relates to the rights and privileges of individuals. In Britain, for example, the Church of Scientology has not been allowed to register i 4.2 Reasons for studying religion Identify and jot down reasons that you think might prompt someone to make a study of religion. Here are some reasons in no special or 2.4 Activities 9 and 10 Watch the next segment of video. Once you’ve watched the video, jot down some notes on what you learnt about how the Grand Louvre meets the needs of today. Click to view video 2.3 Activities 6 to 8 Watch the next segment of video. Once you’ve watched the video, make a few notes on what you’ve learnt about how the taste of the court was challenged by a new public. Click to view video 3.4 The mass production of death Mass shootings by soldiers and Einsatzgruppen and the use of the mobile gas vans took time and energy. There was concern about the effects on the morale of the men involved. Towards the end of 1941, even before the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis had begun building camps in Poland that incorporated large gas chambers for the mass production of death. Belzec was the first to come into operation in February 1942, killing people with carbon monoxide first released from bottles and subsequen 8 Voice Is the speaker in a poem one and the same as the writer? Stop and consider this for a few moments. Can you think of any poems you have read where a writer has created a character, or persona, whose voice we hear when we read? Wordsworth's The Prelude was written as an autobiographical poem, but there are many instances where it is obvious that poet and persona are different. Charlotte Mew's poem, ‘The Farmer's Bride’ (1916) begins like this: 3 Rhythm All speech has rhythm because we naturally stress some words or syllables more than others. The rhythm can sometimes be very regular and pronounced, as in a children's nursery rhyme – ‘JACK and JILL went UP the HILL’ – but even in the most ordinary sentence the important words are given more stress. In poetry, rhythm is extremely important: patterns are deliberately created and repeated for varying effects. The rhythmical pattern of a poem is called its metre, and we can analyse, or â 1.1 Mathematics in Egyptian history Only a small number of the surviving Egyptian papyri are concerned with mathematical calculations – perhaps a dozen or so in all, of which the earliest dates from about 1850 BC and the most recent from AD 750. The two major ones are the Rhind Papyrus (named after the man who bought it on his holidays in Luxor in 1858), which you can see in the British Museum, and the Golenischev (or Moscow) Papyrus, which is in Moscow. They are dated at around 1650 BC and 1850 BC respectively. So here are a Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. Courtesy of Lanterna at Flickr All other materials included in this unit are derived from conten 1.5.2 What is the significance of the numbers? In seeking the significance of these numbers, there is more information on the tablet that we have not yet taken into account, namely the text of the column headings themselves. The heading of column A is partly destroyed, but the text headings for B and C are clearer. B says something like ‘ib-sa of the front’, and C ‘ib-sa of the diagonal’, where ib-sa is a Sumerian word whose significance here is not precisely known. The geometrical 1.4 A remarkable numeration system The Babylonian numeral system was described in Section 3 as ‘remarkable’. It is worth spelling out the reasons for this judgement. Although what we notice first is that it was a place-value system (see Box 1), what is perhaps more striking is the coupling of this feature with a ‘floating sexagesimal point’; that is, the lack of any indication about the absolute value of the number. This makes life hard for us in reading the tablets initially, but seems to have given the Babylonians un 1 Babylonian mathematics In Mesopotamia, the scribes of Babylon and the other big cities were impressing on clay tablets economic and administrative records, literary, religious and scientific works, word-lists, and mathematical problems and tables. Nearly all of the texts that give us our fullest understanding of Babylonian mathematics—indeed, of any mathematics before the Greeks—date from about 1800—1600 BC. During this period, King Hammurabi unified Mesopotamia out of a rabble of small city-states into an em Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: know something about cuneiform how it was used to represent numbers for mathematical problem solving and computation; understand the relationship between a decimal place-value system and a sexagesimal one; appreciate the advanced understanding of mathematics in Ancient Mesopotamia in relation to anyone in medieval Christian Europe 3000 years later. 6 Conclusion William Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, two days after hearing that the legislation for the abolition of slavery in British dominions had successfully completed its passage through the House of Commons, a fitting conclusion to the work he had begun nearly half a century before. The Practical View both reflected and contributed to a major shift in religious consciousness of which the continuing growth of the Evangelical movement was the most striking manifestation. Methodist num 4.1 The impact of A Practical View
A Practical View is significant both as a kind of ‘manifesto’ by a prominent figure in a religious movement of rapidly expanding influence, and as part of an ongoing process of reflection on the state of British politics and society in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Wilberforce had been working on it intermittently for four years before its eventual publication on 12 April 1797. As a busy politician he struggled to find the time for sustained writing. He had initially had 2 Britain and the French Revolution In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Edmund Burke (1729–97) made clear his hostile reaction to the Revolution, which he perceived as a dangerous destruction of tradition and continuity in favour of abstract Enlightenment principles. On the other hand, there was a substantial cross-section of British opinion that initially warmly welcomed the Revolution, including Wilberforce himself, as well as much more radical individuals, such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809). Init 1.2 Upbringing; MP for Yorkshire William Wilberforce (Figure 1) was born in Hull, the son and grandson of substantial merchants who had made their fortune in trade between Yorkshire and the Baltic. His father died in 1768 and he subsequently went to live for a period with his uncle and aunt. Through them he was exposed not only to the influence of John Newton, but also to that References
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