ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches a paradigm for the sociology of religion and the gods. Religious beliefs and institutions were an important concern of the nineteenth-century social thinkers who fashioned the sociological perspective. Among the leading contributors to the sociology of religion in that century were William Robertson Smith, Ludwig Feuerbach, Louis Wallis, Karl Kautsky, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and, most importantly, Emile Durkheim. These thinkers set the foundation for revealing the sociological reality that God only “exists” as a human-created symbol of society.
