Robert Neelly Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellahwas an American sociologist, and the Elliott Professor of Sociology, as well as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth23 February 1927
CountryUnited States of America
ignorance done world
The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we're politically correct on everything, but it's still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong.
mother children past
The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.
mean thinking years
"Nothing is ever lost" means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are.
hands problem cases
The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.
real buddhism important
Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.
practice way belief
It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.
strong buddhism simple
Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.
religious creativity issues
One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate - obviously you couldn't be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it's not always there in the foreground. If you don't understand that, you're missing a lot.
men religion purpose
...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.
reality expectations trouble
The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.
children people desire
While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.
narrative evolution scientist
We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.
competition who-we-are morality
We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition.
fate israel views
We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.