They are not alone

So far all that has been looked at in this blog is to state that Godzilla is religious which is fine when considering that the blog is all about Godzilla, however i feel its time to address the question of what exactly religion is and how it works on a social, theological and personal level. This was touched upon in the post called the congregation, but this was not the most academic way of dealing with the idea of what can be considered as religious. To say that this will define religion would be a lie as this question has stumped some of the greatest thinkers to ever lived, but i shall attempt to answer the question anyway. Some argue that religion doesn’t really exist — there is only culture. Jonathan Z. Smith. I have to say that i agree with this comment. Although not quite so simply. I believe that there is religion and that with religion there are a number of set principles that are connected, these can differ from religion to religion for example by praying to god a Christian is a step closer to Salvation. And if a Buddhist meditates then they are closer to enlightenment. However i believe that although there are set rules, these are all subject to certain amount of personal interpretation, which in turn is affect by the time period and society we live in. I think that religion is a concept that can change while continuing to hold absolute truths; this may be a result of my own religious background and the fact that i have studied religion. “...while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion — there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.” http://atheism.about.com/od/religiondefinition/a/definition.htm This comment is also true in that when religion was first apparent within society, there would have not been any form of labelling under the banner of "religion" this is a solely scholarly word to generalise a concept. However religion in practise is real there has always through out time been a hope to be better than that which we are, a hope of something more. This is clear in the concept of afterlife, there are said to be only a few definites in life, taxes and death, this shall look at the finite truth of the death of the physical. Humanity has always been fascinated with the afterlife examples of ways in which we have come up with ingenious ways to cheat death are the rituals that humans have invented to make the passage to the afterlife guaranteed. Egyptians are the most obvious in elaborate burial procedures. This was a cultural creation of treating the body delicately and precisely. The point that is being made here is that the concept of religion is built upon the unknown, and that the ritual, which is followed, is dictated by the culture with which a person lives. And it is these rituals that make a particular religion. For instance it’s Jesus that makes Christianity, but it’s the literal belief in the ritual of the body and blood of Christ that makes a person Catholic. So how does this relate to Godzilla, well if there is ritual with Godzilla then maybe it is the process of watching the films that make it religious in a cultural sense Godzilla is attacking all those things which we are trying to stop such as pollution, as it must be remembered that Godzilla was created through humanities poor treatment of the world around them. It is this that makes Godzilla religious.