The Role of Culture in Religiosity and the Network of Religious Knowledge

Contrary to a common conception, religiosity and the network of religious knowledge include belief and acting upon a system of beliefs, moral codes, and worship practices, among which a gradational causal relation obtains. Moreover, there is a network relation among beliefs, rulings, and worship practices such that the closer those beliefs, moral codes, and worship practices are to the core of the religion, the more constant, the more universal, and occasionally the more rational they will be. In contrast, those beliefs, moral codes, and worship practices that are farther from the core of the religion are more marginalized from religiosity and the religious epistemic network, and are more related to the society, culture, and people’s living. In this case, culture in its general sense includes the most important achievements as well as epistemic and non-epistemic factors affecting the margins of religiosity and the network of religious knowledge. In fact, in accordance to the culture in which a religion is developed, a kind of cultural religiosity can be identified; that is, religiosity takes the color of the relevant culture and its function is based on peculiarities of the culture. It must be noted that to acknowledge effects of culture on margins of religiosity and the network of religious knowledge is not to change the nature of religiosity, because contrary to advocates of secularization of religiosity in the society, although it is remarkable that religiosity takes the color of the relevant culture in the margin of the religiosity network, the closer we get to the core of the network the weaker are cultural effects. In fact, in the core, religiosity is more pure and clear. In this paper, I show that cores of divine religions are merely slightly affected by such cultural influences, and such influences can be handled by religious people.