Interpreting religious symbols as basic component of social value formation

The tolerance of today’s society provokes complex processes of distorting religious values which in their turn bring value degradation of the secular society Researchers in the fields of Sociology and religion actively study one constituent of the problem - value deformation of the secular culture, whilst giving little attention to the other - namely, transformation of religious values. The study of religious community is built on the interpretative row which is based on secular beliefs and principles of methodological atheism. However, there are at least three areas of interpretation of the same religious symbols: theological, scientific, in this case sociological, and secular. The used terminology is almost the same in all of those three areas, but the symbolic significance of these terms is ambiguous. So, speaking about the influence of values, mostly we can talk about the interpretation of these concepts-symbols. This paper attempts to reveal some interpretative zones of religious symbolism and how actively the symbols are able to influence the formation of value orientation within the society. © 2018, Ecozone, OAIMDD. All rights reserved.