Elements of Religious Traditions Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Elements of Religious Traditions Paper - Essay Example One way of resolving this difficulty is to take a comparative approach, viewing what happens with an open mind. It is possible to detect similarities and differences which might illuminate key issues which lie at the heart of human religious experience, such as how these religions help people to conduct a relationship with the divine through special holy places and artefacts, special times and a particular way of relating to each other. The twentieth century European scholar Mircea Eliade wrote an influential study on the sacred and the profane, and identified the fact that religious experience often takes place in clearly marked special places: â€Å"Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.† (Eliade: 1987, 26) Natural features like caves, rivers and mountains were often imbued with this notion of sacredness and archaeologists detect elemen ts of religious significance in early monuments such as stone circles and pyramids. Humans appear to have a need to reserve, or indeed construct, very special places in which to step outside the everyday pressures of life and reflect more deeply.