Four Traditional Religions

FOUR TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS

Introduction
We have chosen four examples for study in this Part 2, two from Africa, one from the South Pacific, and one from Asia. They are all different from each other, but they have one thing in common: they are all religions in which the prayers and the beliefs about God are handed down by word of mouth. They do not have any written Scriptures like the Bible or the Qur’an. They depend upon each generation of people hading on their traditions to the next.
There are many religions of this sort all over the world. In some their followers are few in number, often because they live in small and isolated communities. In others their followers number many thousands, and even millions. Each religion differs in some important ways from others, but each religion has important things to say about the way in which human beings have tried to worship God. [p. 14]

One God or Many Gods
The student will notice that in all the religions, people worship many different gods. Many of those who use this book will believe that God is one, and may find the mention of many gods difficult to understand. Perhaps the following points will help students to read these pages with sympathy and understanding.
1. God is present in the world even when human beings do not worship Him. He is present also when human beings have wrong ideas about Him. Humans have a very limited knowledge about God and often make mistakes in praying to Him. But God is loving and gentle: He hears prayers even when people pray badly, or use wrong words to address Him. [p. 14]
2. In many of the religions in which people worship many gods, they also believe that there is one supreme God who rules over all the others. In many cases they call this supreme God by names such as Father and Creator.
3. Some of those who worship many gods recognize that these many gods are very closely united to each other. Some say that the different gods are ‘all parts of one Divinity’. They believe that when they worship one particular god they worship Divinity as a whole. (When the word ‘Divinity’ is written like this with a capital letter, it means the whole group of divine powers and beings. When it is written without a capital letter, ‘divinity’ can be used to mean one of the divine powers or a god.) [p. 14]
4. Many of the less important gods are personal names which people have given to the forces or powers which are at work in nature. Wind, Fire, and Rain, and similar natural forces, act sometimes as if they were living beings, and people treat them as such. [p. 15]

Myth
In religions which have no written Scriptures, people use ‘myths’ instead. These are stories by which people express what they believe about the world in which they live. They are the fruit of people’s thinking about the way life is, and why things happen as they do. In some religions they are written down by later generations.
Myths are usually about subjects like the following:

The creation of the world, both earth and sky.
The origin of man and woman, and the ways in which different tribes came into existence.
The entry of evil and death into the world.
The relationships between human beings and God.
The origin of different kinds of birds, animals, insects, and plants, and sometimes the reasons for their names.
The reasons why particular animals are associated with particular tribes or families.

Many of the myths have been handed down by many generations. They are often in old-fashioned language, and sometimes only the priests or elders are allowed to tell them, because they are among a community’s most valued possessions. In the Bible, the myths of the Hebrews have been written down in the first chapters of Genesis. [p. 15]

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