Interesting Ideas

One of the notions that Max Weber introduces in “The Social Psychology of the World Religions” is how religions take shape in their respective histories based on the core interests of a particular society guided by the specific ideas they hold fast to. There are many roads a religion may take based on the needs or interests of a society. One route that is easily understood in his writing is the idea of redemption stemming from a personal need for salvation based on a “rationalized image of the world.” In essence, the idea that there should be meaning and order in life formed the path in which a group’s interest-based actions carried them to their ultimate goal of salvation.

The case he gives is a general example of Indian and Asiatic world religions in which the significant strata involved were the intellectual elite that searched for the rational. By doing so, the eventual outcome was that practicality usurped the magical realm of religion and placed it into the category of the irrational. As the traditional ideas of their world based on concrete mysticism shifted there was a split between rational knowledge and the metaphysical. In this “world robbed of gods” the only way to achieve salvation or a higher sense of being was through contemplation or meditation as an individual.

Weber essentially establishes that, most importantly, interests regulate how people in a society will act but that ideas of import impress heavily upon the paths they take in achieving what they desire.