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The concept of the holy war is customarily associated with the thought of a war whose basis or justification is religious in a special way. The connection between ‘holy war’ and ‘holy struggle’ was coined by poets of the time of the wars of liberation against Napoleon, especially Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860). The fact that, after the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789, war is presented as holy, rests not on the fact that it was (only) then that the church appealed to war, but on the fact that…

1. a) The concept of religious specialist can denote the results of a permanent division of labor within a religion. The individual members of a religious → group possess distinct competencies when it comes to practicing religion and its acts. In many religions, those who lead religious acts are those who occupy a leading position of honor and power, such as the chiefs of an enterprise, or of the state. But religious specialists can be spoken of meaningfully only where a specific competency in r…

Lunar/Solar Year 1. A calendar presents a system for ordering time by dividing a unit, the year, into a framework whose smallest components are days. This system coordinates a society's social, economic, and religious activities. Objectification and communication are served through ‘natural’ rhythms, impressive meteorological phenomena (seasons), the world of plants and animals, and, frequently, the phases of the visibility of the moon (‘lunation,’ ‘month’). A year built by lunar months (12 × 29.5…

War as a Social Institution 1. Definition: War is an organized carrying out of a → conflict between or among groups equipped with deadly weapons. Unlike the individual exercise of violence, war is therefore a societal institution that permits, indeed legally prescribes, the killing of other persons. Depending on the respective degree of organization and complexity of the societies involved, the profile of war can differ greatly. War presupposes the existence of at least a rudimentary military force an…

A Primary Category 1. Like space, time belongs to the primary categories of human perception and human construction of the world. There is no priority between the two. Time is repeatedly described in metaphors of space (length of time, axis of time), concrete space, at the same time by movements, and therefore by time (three-day trip, or three light-years away). Time appears as a fixed property of the world—unchangeable, encompassing, and subjecting everything to temporalization. Acts and events ca…