Kill the maker (parent), the children becomes despondent and enraged, then kill themselves.
ReligionIn The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim's first purpose was to identify the social origin and function of religion as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity.[41] His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. He wanted to understand the empirical, social aspect of religion that is common to all religions and goes beyond the concepts of spirituality and God.[44]
Durkheim defined religion as
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden--beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.
—Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Book 1, Ch. 1[72]
In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to supernatural or God.[72] Durkheim argued that the concept of supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and separation of supernatural—that which cannot be rationally explained—from natural, that which can.[73] Thus, according to Durkheim, for early humans, everything was supernatural.[73] Similarly, he points out that religions which give little importance to the concept of god exist, such as Buddhism, where the Four Noble Truths is much more important than any individual deity.[73] With that, Durkheim argues, we are left with the following three concepts: the sacred (the ideas that cannot be properly explained, inspire awe and are considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion), the beliefs and practices (which create highly emotional state—collective effervescence—and invest symbols with sacred importance), and the moral community (a group of people sharing a common moral philosophy).[42][73][74][75] Out of those three concepts, Durkheim focused on the sacred, noting that it is at the very core of a religion.[73] He defined sacred things as:
...simply collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects... they are only collective forces hypostasized, that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world.
—Émile Durkheim[76]
Durkheim saw religion as the most fundamental social institution of humankind, and one that gave rise to other social forms.[44][56] It was the religion that gave humanity the strongest sense of collective consciousness.[77] Durkheim saw the religion as a force that emerged in the early hunter and gatherer societies, as the emotions collective effervescence run high in the growing groups, forcing them to act in a new ways, and giving them a sense of some hidden force driving them.[42] Over time, as emotions became symbolized and interactions ritualized, religion became more organized, giving a rise to the division between the sacred and the profane.[42] However, Durkheim also believed that religion was becoming less important, as it was being gradually superseded by science and the cult of an individual.[44][53]
Thus there is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself.
—Émile Durkheim[55]However, even if the religion was losing its importance for Durkheim, it still laid the foundation of modern society and the interactions that governed it.[77] And despite the advent of alternative forces, Durkheim argued that no replacement for the force of religion had yet been created,. He expressed his doubt about modernity, seeing the modern times as "a period of transition and moral mediocrity".[55]
Durkheim also argued that our primary categories for understanding the world have their origins in religion.[56] It is religion, Durkheim writes, that gave rise to most if not all other social constructs, including the larger society.[77] Durkheim argued that categories are produced by the society, and thus are collective creations.[41] Thus as people create societies, they also create categories, but at the same time, they do so unconsciously, and the categories are prior to any individual's experience.[41] In this way Durkheim attempted to bridge the divide between seeing categories as constructed out of human experience and as logically prior to that experience.[41][78] Our understanding of the world is shaped by social facts; for example the notion of time is defined by being measured through a calendar, which in turn was created to allow us to keep track of our social gatherings and rituals; those in turn on their most basic level originated from religion.[77] In the end, even the most logical and rational pursuit of science can trace its origins to religion.[77] Durkheim states that, "Religion gave birth to all that is essential in the society.[77]
In his work, Durkheim focused on totemism, the religion of the aboriginal Australians and Native Americans.[41][72] Durkheim saw totemism as the most ancient religion, and focused on it as he believed its simplicity would ease the discussion of the essential elements of religion.[41][72]
Durkheim's work on religion was heavily criticized on both empirical and theoretical grounds by specialists in the field. The most devastating critique came from Durkheim's contemporary, Arnold van Gennep, an expert on religion and ritual, and also on Australian belief systems. Van Gennep plainly stated that Durkheim's views of primitive peoples and simple societies were "entirely erroneous". Van Gennep further argued that Durkheim demonstrated a lack of critical stance towards his sources, collected by traders and priests, naively accepting their veracity, and that Durkheim interpreted freely from dubious data. At the conceptual level, van Gennep pointed out Durkheim's tendency to press ethnography into a prefabricated theoretical scheme.[79]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim
