AN OUTLINE AND A DEFINITION OF RELIGION WITH A VIEW UPON THE PHENOMENON OF NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Abstract

UDK 27/29
          2-67

Even though religion is a phenomenon that dates long time back in human history, today, after thousands of years, it has not lost its significance and relevance on individual nor on social plane and keeps on making a great deal of influence upon a life of a man and upon the society as a whole. When we say “religion”, we mean a numerous religions, and a great number of varying religious consciousness and religious experience. Man’s tendency  have been expressed and realised through searching for divine within the nature but also in divinization of a human, of a symbol or an object. The need of an individual or of a society for religion increases when faced by turmoil, crisis or tragedy. Then it is often embodied and manifested in divinization of some leader of a party or of ideological system, which even when being actively opposed to religion always carries within itself distinctly religious elements. However, after the Second World War, like mushrooms after the rain, new religious movements started growing and flourishing in the Western world. Main reason for this is that the developed world of the time was shaken by modernity crisis. Diversity of these movements was requiring systematization in order to make understanding of the differences within different movements easier. These new religious movements have relatively small number of adherents when compared to the great world religions.