I, like many others, decided to compare religion but more specifically religious practices. I did the religions of Catholic, Christianity, Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islamic. As I wrote down facts of each and starting comparing and contrasting what each religion does differently there are of course, those that are very similar to each other. One pair are Buddhism and Hinduism. Both religions practice more relation techniques like meditation, and devotion to their deities.  The Islamic culture is very different however. The Islamic religion practices religion by the Five Pillars, mosque services on Fridays and they stay abstinent of alcohol and pork. When comparing when the religions get together to practice worship in groups, I did find it strange that some did so on different days of the week. For example, Christianity practices on Sundays and Islamic on Fridays.

 

 

 

I ended up making a Venn diagram on the treatment of the dead and looked at the Inca’s, Aztec’s, Paris catacombs and the San Francisco cemeteries. I ended up comparing and contrasting them all individually and then between one another. The main theme of my topic is that treatment of the dead is a religious practice that varies only slightly between time and place. Like everything else the more time that passes the more things evolve and change. With this passage of time, we tend to place less emphasis on the past or the dead and think more about the future or living.

As you can see from my diagram each topic has its own individual characteristics from the others but they all have similarities in the way they treated the dead right after death and as time passed. The Incas and Aztecs civilization are both further back in history where preservation of the dead, offerings and polytheism were prevalent. Religion played a much bigger role in the world and heritage and history was needed to show station. As time has passed religion isn’t as big of a driving force in how the world works, mostly there is only one god and we now believe in technology, innovation and progress. This is what shows in the Paris catacombs and San Francisco cemeteries, these events happened in a giant boom for the economy and expansion fueled our drive for a, ‘bigger and more” mentality. The world was growing at such a fast pace and it was no longer necessary to know your heritage, as your birth no longer dictated your station in life. With all of this, the treatment of the dead had to be moved out of the way into a place that would be less disturbing to progress but still enable the dead to be remembered.

For my concept map, I chose to compare and contrast the treatment of the dead between some of the cultures we have been learning about in modules 4 through 6. I focussed on the catacombs in Paris, the issue with overcrowded cemeteries in San Francisco, and the burial practices in both the Byzantine and Mughal empires. From what I discovered, it is interesting that a process that was held so sacred in ancient civilizations is now seen as an inconvenience to modern life. While the massive Taj Mahal was built for the burial of a single person, in Paris the remains of thousands of people were combined into catacombs and in San Francisco one of the biggest cemeteries was turned into a golf course. It seems as though death is becoming less of a sacred topic, and more of a problem and nuisance in modern society.