Sociology of Religion
Other sources of the phenomenon can be autosuggestion, peer pressure, or a desire to experience what others have experienced. Perhaps the most obvious sociological category is the "possession trance." A similar state that could be described as religious ecstasy may occur in the rituals and dances of other religious and cultural traditions; for example Kundalini awakening through shaktipat.
Read more about this topic: Slain In The Spirit
Famous quotes containing the words sociology of, sociology and/or religion:
“Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.”
—Nancy Chodorow, U.S. professor, and sociologist. The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, ch. 2 (1978)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“I do love this people [the French] with all my heart, and think that with a better religion and a better form of government and their present governors their condition and country would be most enviable.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)