Essay Sample on Duality in Religion

Duality is the division of phenomenon into two opposing and interrelated categories. These binary categories extent to the social organization (such as two-party political system or moiety systems) or/and as polarities of experience and logic, social action, and ideologies. The concept of duality is widespread across the society, with the organization of social institutions and social thought patterned into two opposites (Jennings, 2018). Human behavior from different parts of the world indicates they keep inventing and living by this kind of system independently of each other. Wayne Barker identified several social domains such as family, religion, and moral visions, among others, that make up the society. These domains are affected by duality. Religion is one such domain that is greatly affected by duality thinking.

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The aspect of duality in most religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Jewish, is based on the existence of two opposing supernatural beings. On one side, there is a God, a supernatural being that represents goodness while, on the other hand, Satan is representing evil occurrences in society. The people use this duality to describe the existence of good and evil in society (Dollahite et al., 2018). These views exist on the spiritual aspects of the community, thus making it difficult to explain its origin.

The reason why people subscribe to these views is the fact that it has been in the culture of humans ever since the existence of the earliest people. History indicates that despite the geographical location of ancient people, they believed in the presence of God and well as Satan. As a result, these beliefs are entangled into human social existence right from the beginning of human civilization. In the modern era, society has created a middle ground on the issue through the concept of secularization (Rice, 2018). The term secular means something not connected with spiritual or religious matters. For example, the development of science and technology is not governed by any religious beliefs, thus falling under the category of secularism (Billingsley & Fraser, 2019). I subscribe to the concept of secular, especially in terms of science. Religious beliefs do not govern scientific inventions and innovation.

From the above discussion, it is evident that duality provides the foundation for the social, religious domain. In many mainstream religions such as Christianity and Islam, it is the belief in the existence of God and Satan that provide the background to all religious rituals and norms.

References

Billingsley, B., & Fraser, S. (2019). Ways children reason about science and religion in primary school: Findings from a small-scale study in Australian primary schools. In Science and Religion in Education (pp. 203-220). Springer, Cham.https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-17234-3_16

Dollahite, D. C., Marks, L. D., & Dalton, H. (2018). Why religion helps and harms families: A conceptual model of a system of dualities at the nexus of faith and family life. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 10(1), 219-241. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jftr.12242

Jennings, J. N. (2018). Jesus and Kukai: A World of Non-Duality, written by Peter Baekelmans. Exchange, 47(4), 404-405. https://brill.com/view/journals/exch/47/4/article-p404_7.xml

Rice, E. (2018). Freud, Goethe, and Origen: the duality and Slaying of Moses. In The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, V. 18 (pp. 361-380). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203727744/chapters/10.4324/9780203727744-17