Organizing Religious Landscapes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Organizing Religious Landscapes - Essay ExampleSeeking to bring the analysis into a relevant current daylight application, the essay will seek to understand the means by which spiritual landscapes continue to define life, politics, and finis within the counties that comprise central Wisconsin. As a function of seeking to understand such a reality, it will be the hope of this author that such a level of research will supporter to shed a level of pinch on how and why certain regions have developed and exhibit some of the key indicators of both culture, religion, and politics that they do. reverting to the way in which religious barriers can differentiate a region or define a culture in a different way, wizard need tincture no further than the way in which legion(predicate) of the cultural and religious boundaries that exist within Europe have differentiated the total continent in a way that it would not likely have been differentiated had religious differences not existed in t he first place. Whereas the study of geography, anthropology, and sociology leads one to the understanding of how natural barriers and language barriers help to define and distinguish one group from another, religion serves no lesser nor more important purpose in achieving the aforesaid(prenominal) level of differentiation among individuals. To see a prime example of how geography can be decided upon religious terms alone, one need look no further than the way in which the British or French colonialists divided much of the world both in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia based upon religious lines. Evidence of this can of course be seen with regards to the creation of Lebanon, the creation of Papua New Guinea as compared to Indonesia, or the way in which African nations had their borders drawn specifically as a means of differentiating between animist, Muslim and/or Christian. However, geography and the means by which it is defined is not always chosen by an external force. Oftenti mes, the means by which geographic representations are determined are more often than not the result of domestic decisions and choices made at the lowest levels. This low decision making about what defines the other is oftentimes a result of the way in which religion and the perform thereof helps to differentiate one culture with regards to its neighbors. Due to the inherent truth that religion by its very nature seeks to instill a certain personal and group dynamic within the individuals that practice it, it is necessarily a formulary of the way in which culture is defined and comes to shape a given geography. However, it should not be understood that religious differences necessarily leads to the splitting of a nation or a state of war and/or conflict with another group of individuals. Rather, there are many scrupulously diverse regions within the world that live in more or less social cohesion and harmony. An obvious example of this would be with regards to the United States and many regions within Africa, Western Europe, and elsewhere around the globe. However, merely because a level of conflict does not exist should not be seen as an indication that the initiation and adherence to different religions within diverse geographies does not have a