Religion In The Philippines

Reina Sheila T. Samillano Prof. Victoria Diaz

2014-66120 Social Anthro 151

Like culture, “Religion is learned by man as a member of his society” (Vanoverbergh, 1972) through socialization. Religion is one of the important aspects of culture because it is “a system of actions and interactions that are based upon the culturally shared beliefs in sacred supernatural powers” (Malefijt, 1968). On the other hand, William James, stated by Malefijt, defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (Malefijt, 1968). Given these definitions, we can understand Religion as - thoughts, actions and

As a matter of fact, as of the year 2005, 65% of the population are Roman Catholics, 11.9% are Protestants, 4.1% are Iglesia Ni Cristo, another 4.1 % are Aglipayans, 0.1% is Buddhists, 10.2 % are those on other religions and the remaining 4.6% are those with no religious affiliations (Andres, 2005). The point here is that, these are the percentage of the religions we have after the colonial period, so by saying this, several beliefs, traditions, and customs emerged just after the colonial period. Hence of this fact, it is important to know that even before the colonial period, we already had our own beliefs, traditions and

Beliefs in numerous deities are called polytheism, is widespread throughout the world (Bonvillain, 2010, p. 356). And just like any other religious traditions, in the Gaddangs’ animism, their gods were the souls or spirits. Although incorporeal, the Gaddangs treat them as human-like in a sense that they can have wives and children, they can be hurt, they need clothes, they eat and drink, they chew betelnut and do smoke because it is believe that the souls or spirits dress themselves with the “soul” of clothes; eat the “soul” of animals; drink the “soul” of liquor; and chew the “soul” of betelnut. In addition to this, because the Gaddangs treated their gods as human-like, they made names to their gods in order to identify which is which (Lambredht,