The other day, Una and I went to the 素食夜市小吃園遊會 Happy Lantern Green Night Market — a 100% vegetarian (and mostly vegan) Taiwanese street food festival which took place in Alhambra. If that sounds on the surface impossibly niche, consider the following.
Taiwan is the cradle of the night market.
Taiwan is, after India, likely the second most-vegetarian country in the world.
Once one is aware of those three facts, the event probably seems less strange and indeed, in the time it took for us to eat $50 worth of vegetarian Taiwanese street food, business was brisk and seating in short supply.
The event took place on 16 February in the Green Menu Center. It marked the anniversary of that organization’s foundation… and additionally fell reasonably close to the Lunar…
The words “welfare” and “wellbeing” have two very different meanings in economics.
The most familiar meaning to the general public is that Welfare refers to a collection of government programs such as food stamps and Medicare, usually intended to help the poor.
However, economists more often use the word “welfare” in a very different sense–as a synonym for wellbeing. Welfare or wellbeing refer to an overall condition emphasizing happiness and contentment, though also including one’s standard of living in financial or material ways. Welfare in this sense more commonly refers to the condition of an entire country or economy, which is sometimes emphasized by using the phrase “social welfare.” Welfare in the sense of wellbeing turns out to be an easier concept to imagine than to analyze carefully. It is even harder to measure.
Economists have always recognized that not all happiness derives from being financially well off. We all know that being wealthy is not the same as being happy. However, it is rather hard to quantify happiness, and even harder to aggregate happiness across people because people generally have a variety of tastes. Consequently, over the years economists have invented some specialized technical names for happiness, including utility, satisfaction, preferences, tastes, indifference curves, wellbeing, and welfare.
The concept of social welfare sometimes leads to discussions of distribution of income and income inequality.
Well-being, wellbeing, or wellness is the condition of an individual or group. A high level of well-being means that in some sense the individual’s or group’s condition is positive.
Wellness refers to diverse and interconnected dimensions of physical, mental, and social well-being that extend beyond the traditional definition of health. It includes choices and activities aimed at achieving physical vitality, mental alacrity, social satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, and personal fulfillment.
Well-being is a positive outcome that is meaningful for people and for many sectors of society, because it tells us that people perceive that their lives are going well. Good living conditions (e.g., housing, employment) are fundamental to well-being. Tracking these conditions is important for public policy. However, many indicators that measure living conditions fail to measure what people think and feel about their lives, such as the quality of their relationships, their positive emotions and resilience, the realization of their potential, or their overall satisfaction with life—i.e., their “well-being.”1 Well-being generally includes global judgments of life satisfaction and feelings ranging from depression to joy.
More Types
Occupational Wellness is the ability to achieve a balance between work and leisure time, addressing workplace stress and building relationships with co-workers. It focuses on our search for a calling and involves exploring various career options and finding where you fit.
Because what we do for a living encompasses so much of our time, it’s important for our overall well-being to do what we love and love what we do. When people are doing what they were meant to do, they deepen their sense of meaning and purpose.
The Path to Occupational Wellness
The occupational dimension of wellness recognizes personal satisfaction and enrichment in one’s life through work. At the center of occupational wellness is the premise that occupational development is related to one’s attitude about one’s work. Traveling a path toward your occupational wellness, you’ll contribute your unique gifts, skills and talents to work that are both personally meaningful and rewarding. You’ll convey your values through your involvement in activities that are gratifying for you. The choice of profession, job satisfaction, career ambitions, and personal performance are all important components of your path’s terrain.
The first cities emerged as a result of a fundamental reorganization of food production and economic diversification in human societies. Before the advent of cities, ancient peoples lived in clan groups and villages organized around extended kin, or family, relationships and sustained by hunting and gathering of food supplies. Kinship is a system of social organization based on real or putative family ties Gradually these villagers grew more knowledgeable of the various attributes of wild plants in the local area. Over time, as those plants were fully domesticated and controlled by humans, crop yields began to increase. Increasing food supplies, in turn, led to increasing populations, as more and more people could be sustained by the growing food supply. This eventually resulted in the transformation of small kin-based villages into larger towns, and eventually cities. As a result, more efficient farming methods developed and led to increased yields, some members of a society could be released from the daily farming tasks to perform other tasks that were becoming necessary. For example, there was a growing need for containers to store and transport the growing food supplies. This led to the emergence of pottery. As some members of the community became full-time pottery makers, the skill and sophistication of the resulting pottery increased. Other crafts emerged, including metallurgy, the working of various metals into tools and implements. The combination of improved agriculture and new crafts was an explosive one. New tools and farming implements further increased agricultural productivity, enabling additional community members to be released to develop even more crafts. A larger food supply led to increased population which in turn provided more labor available for agriculture, and so on.
This also led to increased prosperity and more complicated arrangements. At the center of these new arrangements was the transfer of agricultural surpluses from the producers of that surplus (the farmers) to the consumers of that surplus (the non-farming city population). In a simple, face-to-face society, this transfer could be voluntary, as villagers shared their produce with relatives or family members. But in the more complex urban societies then emerging, most people were not related to each other and, indeed, did not know each other. In this situation, it would be unlikely that a hard-working farmer would voluntary give up a portion of his produce to non-relatives without some form of persuasion or coercion. This “persuasion” could take many forms. Most commonly, city authorities would promise protection and services (such as irrigation maintenance) in return for regular levees of “tribute” in the form of produce or labor services. Scholars have termed this type of society a “tributary society.” Virtually all societies in history that advanced beyond simple village arrangements were tributary societies, until the advent of industrial capitalist economies in the modern era. As human settlements increased in size and complexity, the social networks based on kinship relations began to break down. In a village community organized around extended families, everyone knew each other and interacted with other members of their community in close face-to-face relationships. Disputes that arose could be contained and resolved by the intervention of other family members before they escalated into violence. But as population growth transformed those small kinship societies of a few hundred people into towns and cities of tens of thousands of people, the old face-to-face relationships could no longer govern social relations. Now, many encounters would take place between people who did not know each other and be not bound to each other by extended family relationships. New systems of social management were needed, leading to the emergence of law codes, police forces and governing elites to manage these new systems. The hierarchical society of the city was born……
A social group is a collection of people who interact with each other and share similar characteristics and a sense of unity. A social category is a collection of people who do not interact but who share similar characteristics. Religion, by this definition is also a social group.
Religion is human’s relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual or divine. Religion consists of a person’s relation to God or to gods or spirit. Religion involves various laws and prohibitions that guide people in their day to day life. These laws or commandments are to serve as guidance to avoid deviations from what is known as normal .
Sociologists study religion as both a belief system and a social institution. As a belief system, religion shapes what people think and how they see the world. As a social institution, religion is a pattern of social action organized around the beliefs and practices that people develop to answer questions about the meaning of existence. As an institution, religion persists over time and has an organizational structure into which members are socialized.
It’s Not About What You Believe
In studying religion from a sociological perspective, it is not important what one believes about religion. What is important is the ability to examine religion objectively in its social and cultural context. Sociologists are interested in several questions about religion:
How are religious beliefs and factors related to other social factors like race, age, gender, and education?
What influence does religion have on other social institutions, such as political or educational institutions?
Sociological Theories of Religion
Each major sociological framework has its perspective on religion. For instance, from the functionalist perspective of sociological theory, religion is an integrative force in society because it has the power to shape collective beliefs. It provides cohesion in the social order by promoting a sense of belonging and collective consciousness. This view was supported by Emile Durkheim.
The second point of view, supported by Max Weber, views religion in terms of how it supports other social institutions. Weber thought that the religious belief systems provided a cultural framework that supported the development of other social institutions, such as the economy.
While Durkheim and Weber concentrated on how religion contributes to the cohesion of society, Karl Marx focused on the conflict and oppression that religion provided to societies. Marx saw religion as a tool for class oppression in which it promotes stratification because it supports a hierarchy of people on Earth and the subordination of humankind to divine authority.
Lastly, symbolic interaction theory focuses on the process by which people become religious. Different religious beliefs and practices emerge in different social and historical contexts because context frames the meaning of religious belief. Symbolic interaction theory helps explain how the same religion can be interpreted differently by different groups or at different times throughout history. From this perspective, religious texts are not truths but have been interpreted by people. Thus different people or groups may interpret the same Bible in different ways.
TYPES OF RELIGIONS
Based on the existence of the number of God or gods religions can be classified into
MONOTHEISM
Belief in the existence of one God.Monotheism is defined as the belief in the existence of only one god that created the world, is all-powerful and intervenes in the world.A broader definition of monotheism is the belief in one god.
Three main religions are known in this case, Christianity, Islam and Judhaism.
Polytheism:
The belief in the existence of many gods. These include hinduism, Budhaism and African traditional religions.Polytheism characterizes virtually all religions other than Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which share a common tradition of monotheism, the belief in one God.
Sometimes above the many gods a polytheistic religion will have a supreme creator and focus of devotion, as in certain phases of Hinduism (there is also the tendency to identify the many gods as so many aspects of the Supreme Being); sometimes the gods are considered as less important than some higher goal, state, or savior, as in Buddhism; sometimes one god will prove more dominant than the others without attaining overall supremacy, as Zeus in Greek religion. Typically, polytheistic cultures include belief in many demonic and ghostly forces in addition to the gods, and some supernatural beings will be malevolent; even in monotheistic religions there can be belief in many demons, as in New Testament in Christianity.
Atheism:
The belief in the existence of no God. In this case, the person doesn’t have belief in the existence of something supernatural or supreme.
Atheism is, in the broadest sense, the absence of belief in the existence of deities.Less broadly, atheism is the rejection of belief that any deities exist.In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism,[which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists.
The doctrine that there is oneness of creation and creator. Meaning there is no difference between God and what he created. The universe is conceived as a whole in God. There is no God, the substance forces and laws put the universe in order God and nature are 2 names for the same thing(identical reality)otherwise,the totality of God and universe would be greater than God alone.
In pantheism, God is viewed as the soul of the universe, the universal spirit present everywhere, which at the same time “transcends” all things created.
While pantheism asserts that “all is God”, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe. Some versions of panentheism suggest that the universe is nothing more than the manifestation of God. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God, like in the Kabbalah concept of tzimtzum. Also much Hindu thought – and consequently Buddhist philosophy – is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism.The basic tradition however, on which Krause’s concept was built, seems to have been Neoplatonic philosophy and its successors in Western philosophy and Orthodox theology
This is the belief in spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and are capable of intervening in them. Tylor made great contributions in this aspect.
The term animism denotes not a single creed or doctrine but a view of the world consistent with a certain range of religious beliefs and practices, many of which may survive in more complex and hierarchical religions.
This is concerned with the belief in kingship or a mystical relationship between man and natural object e.g plants and animals.
Totemism is belief in the kinship of a group of people with a common totem. The word totem is derived from the Ojibwe (Chippewa) word ‘odoodem’ meaning “his kinship group” signifying a blood relationship. Totemism was the practice of having a natural object or animate being, such as as a bird or animal, as the emblem of a family, clan, or tribe. Totemism encompassed a system of tribal organization according to totems. A totem was believed to be mystically related to the group and therefore not to be hunted.
The totem adopted by a clan or family, most often an animal, is an object of religious veneration for the tribal community that bears the name of the totem refer to Animal Totems. The group’s members are therefore forbidden to hunt, kill, or eat the totem. Because of the family connections to the same totem, they are also forbidden to marry one another.
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