During the 2nd lecture and tutorial of society and lifestyle module, we looked at various aspects of religion and how it affects the society we live in.

I feel that I have gained a lot of knowledge from today’s lecture. However,  I will have to follow up with independent study to gain a better understanding of the points discussed during the lecture.

From today’s lecture, tutorial and independent task I have learned that religions and culture can have a huge impact in the society we live in. Both religion and culture are vital in helping one to form their identity and they can influence how an individual lives their life. Every religion encourages supporting  those who are less well off – this is one of the positive aspect of religion. Religion helps people to come together to tackle social problems. However, there are always some people who may misuse religion and promote violence. The violence they promote should not be associated with the religion they are as no religion promotes violence. During the lecture, we also looked into how religion may impact an individual’s life. We were given the example of how Jehovah’s Witnesses’ can not accept blood transfusions and how this can affect their health. We looked into three different scholars; Max Weber , Karl Marx and Bruce Lincolm. Weber and Marx are the extreme scholars who hold different views. We discussed further about the different scholar’s during the tutorial group task.

I understood most of the main concepts and issues from today’s lecture. However, I feel that I will need to revisit and look into detail about unchurched spirituality as this topic consisted many new terms which I had not come across before.

An area which I  will require particular improvement in is how to link the scholars whilst writing essays. To address this issue, I will try to read more academic books and journals and try to make connections between the views that different scholar hold and the main concept that were discussed today.