Religious Culture

Religious culture is a manifestation of an inherent endowment within human nature of an awaken sense of unseen controlling power’s with the emotion and morality connected with such belief.

Religious culture is an organized system of belief in supernatural and in certain ways of life which reflect the people’s ideas of traditional belief of God and spirits.

Many religions try to explain the world of mankind and contain the belief in another existence.

The Edo think of the Universe as being divided into parts-the actual visible world in which people live and the invisible or unseen world of numerous deities, spirits and other supernatural powers.

These supernatural beings can be classified into many groups such as deities, ancestors, spirits, gods and powers.

Every individual is thought of consisting the living person in this mundane world and the spiritual counterpart in the spirit world.

Early civilization endowed objects with superhuman powers by worshipping an object containing magic spirit which can ward off evil and danger.

Gradually the belief in these magical powers led to the manifestation of gods and human spirit. Most early religions had special festivals and sacrificial rites and the first laws of the society sprang from prohibitions.

Religious culture is the belief in spiritual beings or a system of relations between human beings and a supreme power, superior and external to human consciousness and the visible world.
Religious culture is the experience of the awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery of the balance between hope and despair.

The objects are systems of information which enable human beings to construct their lives as religious experience occurs within such a system thus ‘images’ and status, photographs and articles help the believers to focus and articulate the experience.

The believer begins to rationalize and explain “the real is made more real” through the imaginative and creative power of the intellect.

Religious symbols are objective cultural and historical reality with narrative structure, and for some believers, religious experience is an immediate mystical experience. It is expressed through cultural or traditional symbol of worshipping in moral behaviour which is nothing more than worship in the broad sense.

It is the system of symbols which acts to establish powerful and long lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of general order of existence with such factuality that the moods and motivations seem very realistic.

Religion, using the symbols of culture unifies and intensifies experience and make the real more real, by shaping the believer to reality and shaping reality to believer as religion replicates both what is, and what is coming into reality or existence, and helps the people to construct their lives.

Important world religions nowadays are monotheism-the belief in one supreme God and the worship of several gods-Dualism, as well as zoroastrianism- the belief in equal forces of good and evil founded by Prophet Zoroaster.

The importance of social expression of religion is displayed in the categorization of religion into tribal, national and Universal. The tribal and national religions experience could be the manifestation of an individual’s participate in it. This demonstrates that the religious culture is basically rooted in one person’s religious experience.

The participation is the guarantee of the legitimacy and objectivity of the personal experience. This participation is a natural or cultural get together whose exclusive team spirit includes “the life of the individuals concerned”.

The world wide religions grow in some way of natural togetherness whose authority has been devastated by the getting in touch with other cultures and blending with them. They certainly seek their co-operative assurance in a good communal organization instituted only on one religion with its official experts.

The first religious expert is the priesthood — Ohen which seems to originate from the earliest inception of religious culture — ‘kohen’

These cultures of affairs pave way for a reason to justify religion with the tribal-cultural mentality, since the mundane power is of profane origin. It looks for a coalition with the customary representatives of the groups. These representatives are divested of their role but rewarded with the specialized religious role.

Among the specialists is the prophet - Akhase. A prophet is God’s spokes person and is the moral conscience of the masses and a reformer but if the prophet is rejected it might lead to evolve as a founder of a new religion that might differ from the cultural structure.

In this case prophets are not only universal in outlook but tends to pass beyond the national religion into a single universal religion.

Religious culture by a given community is a rule of human conduct or a community accepted principle of conduct and not an imposed will of someone.

This means that the groups religion has the support and approval of the masses and its morality are completely identified, hence when a person is so integrated, the person becomes the community and the community becomes the person to the extent that if the community starts misbehaving, one member of the community can serve as a protesting voice to God who intervenes invariably and so the community can stay morally just and right.

Religious culture, in sum total is a human relation to divinity and submission to mandates and precepts of supernatural or superior beings. It includes all forms of belief in the existence of superior beings exercising power over human beings by volition, rules of conduct, with future rewards and punishments.