Not quite independently from social changes (see my blog post below: Social Changes from Emancipation) caused by economic and commercial influences, changes in religious belief systems have occurred ever since the very beginning, when god was first invented in the form of spirits and symbols that were attached to objects.
With the development of less symbolic and more speech oriented language, with semantic and grammatical clarity, there was a gradual change of emphasis:
“The demystification and a consequential loss of power of the sacred realm took place via the conversion of ritually secured normative basic consensus into speech; in train with that followed the birth of the rationalisation potential imbedded in communicative action. The aura of the enchantment and horror radiating from the sacral, the enthralling power of the holy, is transformed into the binding power of the criticisable claim to validity, both sublime and banal.”
Habermas, quoting the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1958–1917), describes the process whereby religious powers attributed to objects gradually became reified. In this way, the concepts of god or spirit became formed in their own identity rather than in those of objects. While they may have had a preferred location for their existence, they were not attached to those locations or objects and became less concrete. The Greek and Roman polytheism represented a higher form of that animism, and took a new step toward transcendence. The gods’ dwelling places withdrew from the human communities to the mysterious heights of Olympus and the depths of earth. Only when Christianity deriving from Judaism arrived, did god finally move to its own kingdom, which is not of this earth. The separation of nature and divine was so complete that it showed signs of animosity. (Jürgen Habermas – Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns – Volume 2, 1995, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft – my interpretations).
At the same time, the notions of divinity became more generalised and abstract; they were no longer impressions, as in the beginning, but ideas.
In summary, the rationalisation of worldviews is expressed as a process of abstraction that changes mythical powers into transcendental gods and eventually sublimates them as ideas and concepts, and, at the expense of the shrunken realm of the divine, leaves nature behind without gods.
“Ultimately the rationalised world views have to compete with the authority of a fully secularised science. This will develop a reflexive attitude opposite tradition as such. The fundamentally problematic transmission of the tradition can now only be continued through the medium of controlled critical theory (Kritik). Traditional awareness of time does now have to be switched into an orientation towards the future.” (Habermas, 1995)
The rationalisation of the religious world views then reinforces the need for the separation of religion from the state. The state, on the other hand, is then forced, by the development of capitalism, to ‘control’ moral or ethical issues by devising legitimacy and introducing laws and control agencies. Individual ethics had previously been applied as a leftover of the ‘protestant business-ethic’ that prevailed in Europe during the early reformation. By contrast, in a people where state and religion have not become separated, such as in some Muslim countries that manifest themselves as unbroken totally integrated societies, such rationalisation has not yet taken place.
“In an unbroken integrated society the religious cult is like a ‘total institution’, which encompasses and normatively integrates all activities, be they in the family or in the area of communal work, and which treats any transgression of norms as sacrilege. While such basic institutions can use language for communicating situation and task specific norms, the communicative action again remains limited to an instrumental role, and the influence language has on validity and application of norms can be disregarded.”(Habermas, 1995)
