英语辩论发言稿急

英语辩论发言稿急
英语辩论发言稿
急

英语辩论发言稿急
Almost everybody assumes that Chinese religion is polytheist in nature. My question is: where did this sort of religion come from? How did it originate? As for the origin of religion in general, there have been two opposite theoretical explanations. The first is a quite prevailing one, as represented by such giant thinkers as Herbert Spencer, Burnet Taylor, George Frazer, etc. According to them, religions have been developed evolutionally in a progressive way, i.e., from the pre-or/and simi-religions in the pre-historical time, to the polytheism in most ancient civilizations, and lastly, to the monotheism only in Judaism, Christianity and Islamism. On the other side, William Schmidt and others represent an opposite theory. They attempted to prove that the developing line of religion is not progressive, but degenerate from a primary monotheism in the process of cultural diffusion to varieties of polytheism, and even lower forms of superstition.
A key point of their disagreement concerns the objects of religious worship. According to the progressive theory, the low, manifold and complex worship objects converged upon the simple, unified and higher ones, and finally, upon the ultimate reality pointing to a unique, supreme God. The degenerate theory assumed an opposite direction of divergence, starting with the supreme God and ending with the lowest sort of religions.
The debate between the two theories has taken place since the second half of the 19th century. Due to the limit of knowledge and interest, both sides could hardly take account of Chinese religion in the ancient time. Western scholars took it for granted that the Chinese religion is a form of polytheism, and originated from totem worship, animism and magic rituals, as they had seen in other primitive cultures.
Since this century many new discoveries and interpretations have been made in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics and cross-cultural studies. These enable us to rethink the origin and development of the Chinese religion in the context of the unsolved debate between progressive and degenerate theories.
The chronology of the Chinese religion can be divided into 3 stages: the primary religion in the pre-historical time, the primary system of polytheism in the Shang and Chou Dynasties, and the proliferated forms of polytheism from Chin Dynasty to the present time. We know little about the primary religion and focus ourselves on the religion in the Shang and Chou Dynasties.
According to my analysis, the polytheistic system in that time manifested a hierarchy of objects of worship, from the highest, supreme God, to the ancestral spirits, and then to the natural spirits and the lowest spirits of ordinary life.
Based on the exegesis of oracle bone inscriptions in the Shang time and classics in the pre-Chin time, my paper is intended to prove the thesis that it is unlikely that the polytheism in the Shang and Chou time resulted from a converging progress from more primitive and lower worships. That religious system was constructed and functioned downwards from above, rather than upwards from below.
I dare to present arguments for the above thesis as follows.
I. It is unlikely that the supreme God was produced by Shang people as a result of the convergence from their images of ancestral spirits.
1) The Shang people didn’t have the idea that God had a blood relationship with their ancestors. Their relationship was rather conceived as the host-guest relation.
2) God did not communicate with people directly, but only indirectly through the mediation of their ancestors.
3) God was conceived as the source of life and the originator of mankind, yet without sexual behavior and natural birth. This perplexity led to the myth of the sympathetic birth in almost all ancient societies.
4) God was not produced as a result of the abstraction from the total image of their ancestors. This can be shown by the ritual order, in which the rites for the God was strictly distinguished from, and higher than the rites for the totality of ancestors.
II. It is unlikely that the God was produced as a result of a converging development from natural spirits.
1) Natural spirits were the personal images of the minister-ancestors. It is illogical to conceive them as the image of God who is higher than the king-ancestors.
2) The God named as Ti in the Shang time, and was neither the God of heaven, nor a natural God. He was identical with the Heaven (Tian) only later in the Chou time.
3) The shift from Ti to Tian can be explained in terms of moralization from a humanistic perspective, but also in terms of a degeneration of religious faith and feeling from a theological (not necessarily Christian) perspective. The tendency of degeneration continued in and after the pre-Chin time and led to a naturalistic attitude towards Heaven.
III. Ancestral spirits were not worshiped as a result of the converging development of animism and totem.
1) Ancestral spirits were dead persons with both spirit and body. Therefore no difference between spirit and ghost existed in that time. Those personal spirits and ghosts are not the same as souls in the animism that Taylor proposed.
2) Ancestral spirits were not developed from totem worship. According to my own interpretation, a totem is a symbol used for the classification of blood ties and the identity of a clan. When the totem symbols were changed into name during the time of the beginning of a primitive language, especially in the process of the origin of the pictorial language of the chinese, the symbolized animals were confused with the first ancestor of the clan.
3) The transformation from totem worship to ancestral worship can be understood better as the mythical origin, caused by a certain “linguistic disease” (in the words of Max Müller). .
VI. The divination in the Shang and Chou time cannot be interpreted by Frazer’s theory of magic in terms of shamanism.
1) Divination was used as a necessary means to communicate with the God after a religious reform in the pre-historical time, which broke the Heaven-Earth link.
2) The diviner (wu) is not the same as a magician. The role assigned to the wu was to serve as mediator in communication. He was only able to pass the divine prediction without any power to change it, much less affect or even control God by his magic power.
3) The wu has to show the great piety and respect for the God in order to receive the divine information. Divination was practiced as a part and an effect of the divine worship, and cannot be prior to the notion of an omniscient God.
参考资料：http://162.105.161.68/forum/viewtopic.php?t=60