Durkheim defined religion as a system of beliefs and practices which relate to sacred things, these sacred things unite individuals into a moral community. The ‘things’ which religions hold as sacred are only sacred because the religion puts so much emphasis on it’s supposed sacredness but it is man who creates what is sacred and what isn’t which shows how there is not necessarily truth behind religious teachings because they are simply creations of mankind given social status to control how we think. Therefore people hold similar views in society and we can work together with less conflict.
My research mainly focuses on the functions/reasons for religion and according to O’Dea there are six main functions of religion which are:
1. Aid the individual in providing support, consolation, and reconciliation.
2. Provides a transcendental relationship with the beyond.
3. Makes sacred the norms and values of established society
4. Calls society’s norms and values into question
5. Provides a sense of individual identity and helps with the self-concept formation.
6. Aids in the growth and maturation of the individual and his passage through the various age grading.
I will try to discover if people today believe these are the main functions of religion, but obviously for my questionnaire I will have to re-phrase these functions so anybody who doesn’t study sociology can understand them.
Weber found that capitalism had developed only in the West because it was here where the religion formed value-systems. I think that people do work harder because of religious beliefs motivating them to do their best so they can gain points for a good place in the afterlife. I therefore think when asked if you believe in an afterlife the majority of people will answer either ‘yes’ or unsure because it is a very big factor for many people and even non religious people think about it a lot.
Methodology
The method I will be using to gather my information will be in the form of questionnaires as I believe that this will give the largest amount of feedback for my research and will therefore give a more accurate picture of the issue I am looking into. I believe questionnaires are the best method for my research because they can be filled in at the respondents own time so they don’t feel as though you are invading any of their time especially since they can chose to simply not fill it in at all. I realize this could cause a problem for me when I am gathering the information back in because often you will not get all the questionnaires handed back however the majority should send them back and with a large enough sample a few missing questionnaires should not affect the overall conclusion dramatically. Also I feel that other research methods such as interviews would be unnecessary for my work because the questions are simple enough to understand from a questionnaire and the subject is not a particularly sensitive one so people would not need a sympathetic approach to the issues raised as can be used in an interview to relax respondents into opening up in their answers.
I aim to hand out 30 copies of my questionnaire as this should be a large enough sample to work with and by asking friends/family/students etc then I will be able to gain access to the audience I need as I need a variety of people to take part I think this size sample will provide good validity to my research because you need a range of views to gain an accurate picture of what the majority and minority think. The sample will hopefully be a fairly even balance of male and female and any age range can take part (starting at about 15) because anyone over this age should understand the questions and have valid opinions on the topic. My questionnaire is designed to ask people what they think religion can offer to the individual as well as society and weather it’s influence on people is a beneficial factor of society or a negative aspect. I will do this through open and closed questions to gain a variety of responses to work with, I will aim to make the open questions as easy to understand as possible perhaps by offering suggestion answers. However this may be difficult because I will have to make sure that the questions are worded in a way that doesn’t show any personal bias. Despite this problem I think this is the best method for my research because it is a subject that most people would not have objections to expressing their opinions on and so long as do not appear in favor of any particular way of thinking then there would be no need for anyone in the sample to feel as though their views were in any way inferior to anybody else’s responses.
I will release a pilot copy before the real questionnaire to test out my questions and see if they are easily understood, this should help make the feedback more valuable because respondents should understand the questions better. A pilot copy would also be useful to highlight if there are any aspects of my questionnaire that could be seen as too intrusive or unethical in my questioning because I would not want to offend anyone who is answering the questions.
Evidence
My first question asked in my questionnaire was ‘Do you follow any religious beliefs?’ which is a closed question and the graph below shows the response:
We can see from this that although 12 out of the 30 people asked claimed they do have some religious beliefs, the majority said ‘no’. I had stated in my rationale that I would have liked as even a number of religious and non religious people to take part but since religion is currently declining this proved difficult.
To discover if people tend to hold more conservative ways of thinking I asked if they thought churches should allow females to become priests, as the more conservative answer would have been negative. I was surprised to discover that half of those questioned said ‘sometimes’ and over a quarter said ‘yes’ females should be allowed to be priests.
My last closed question was ‘Do you believe in an afterlife?’ and here are the results:
As you can see most said ‘unsure’ but more people said ‘yes’ than ‘no’ which suggests that even if the respondent said they did not follow religious beliefs they would consider the idea of an afterlife. This shows that religious ideas can affect non religious people because they make so many things sacred.
For my open questions I mainly got the responses I guessed I would. When I asked ‘Do you think religion can be beneficial to the individual’s life-style? (Can it make life easier/happier?) Why?’ answers which appeared often included:
*it gives meaning to life
*offers reward of afterlife
*promotes good messages of love/caring
*gives answers to the un-known
*helps deal with life’s problems
These all show that religion is a good thing for the individual and most people were saying points based on that. (21 out of 30 people answered positively to this question)
Of the few who believed religion is bad for the individual all that really stood out was
*blind you to the realities of life
Because the other answers were focused on how it isn’t good or bad, religion isn’t as relevant today therefore doesn’t affect individuals enough.
Another open question was ‘Do you think it is acceptable for people to advertise a religious way of thinking through posters, house visits etc? Why? I discovered that almost everybody agreed that house visits were unnecessary because they see them as ‘intrusive’, ‘annoying’ and ‘forcing your beliefs on someone’. 23 people commented on this. Of those 23, 15 said that posters were ok. The other 7 people asked didn’t have a problem with posters or house visits as they suggested it is forms of freedom of speech and that you have a choice whether or not to read or listen to them. This evidence would suggest therefore that although many people aren’t religious they keep open minds on the issue of religion and are mainly tolerant of others views, most simply would prefer views in the form of posters.
Evaluation
My rationale stated that religion is used as a control device within societies to make people behave in the way the ruling class wants them to. Throughout my research I discovered that the majority of people don’t have religious beliefs but there are still a significant amount of religious believers or people who are unsure about their beliefs. The strongest belief weather you’re religious or not were the belief in the afterlife. I think this could prove that religion acts as a control device because it offers a reward that you can’t question because nobody can say for definitive if there is or isn’t an afterlife. Religions play on this by stating if you live your life obeying its rules you will gain a good status in the afterlife and if you ignore the rules you might go to hell. This idea scares many people and so even if they don’t worship in church they may well hold similar morals to religious people. Because we all want this place in the afterlife and the way of getting it is to become a ‘good’ citizen what happens is we work harder in the workforce which boosts capitalism, and of course this is the ruling classes influence so our society remains the same with a healthy economy which benefits only their class because the working class stay exploited working to fill the pockets of the ruling class.
My methodology stated I would use questionnaires and I believe that this was an effective choice of method because it allowed me to show some scientific based knowledge from the responses by transforming the answers into graphs making the information easier to compare and understand. I also managed to summaries what the open questions managed to reveal. I had some difficulty in the wording of the questions to begin with because I had phrased them in a way where if you didn’t study sociology you may not have understood the question. This therefore limited me slightly in the questions I could ask and I had to cut a couple of questions out of the final copy because of this. Overall I believe the responses matched what I hoped I would find out with the odd exception of the question about female priests because I had assumed more people would of said they should not be allowed since there are so few around at the moment, this showed that the people I asked were mostly more liberal in their thinking. If I was to do this questionnaire again I would ask a bigger sample such as 100 people because I think this sort of size would give much more reliable and valid results. Also I was hoping to look at a range of religions in my study but became restricted to mainly only Christianity, if O did this again I would plan ahead to make sure I found people from a wider range of backgrounds to answer my questionnaire as this would give a better overall picture of the general publics beliefs.