Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim was born in 1858 and died in 1917. He was a French sociologist, and known as the founder of sociology (Pals,2006, p 85-87). Durkheim had an interest in the society, and used it as a central factor to understand human behavior and thought. During his early life, he was influenced by both August Comte, and the ideas behind the evolutionist theory. This made Durkheim what we consider him today, a functionalist. (Pals, 2006, p. 92-93) He looked to society and saw that everything in a community, city or nation serves a function. Individuals do not exist alone, laws, family, schools, science, culture and religion has a special function in the society. This affect how we think and behave. He looked at individuals in the way that:“Without a society to give them birth and shape them, he claimed, none of these things could exist” (Pals, 2006, p.85). Individuals complement a nation and vice versa.
One of the fields Durkheim was very interested in was religion. He thought that "the idea of society is the soul of religion”(Bartel, 09.06.16). In 1912 his famous and well known book the elementary forms of religious life (Pals, 2006, p.88) was published. This book is primarily on primitive religions in Australia, but he also draw some connections to religion in general. Personally, Durkheim was from a Jewish family, but he himself was an agnostic. In his book, he writes: “Fundamentally, then, there are no religion that are false. All are true after their own fashion: All fulfill given conditions of human existence, though in different ways. Granted, it is not impossible to rank them hierarchically” (Durkheim, 1995, p.2). This means that there is no religion that are more worth then others. Even though we talk about a primitive religion, Christianity or Islam we need to respect all traditions equally, and remember that religion is correct in the society that it belong. In different ways, different religions fulfill a function in the society and cannot be separated from the individual that exist in a society.