Understanding Human Need

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (PPTX)
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How do religious traditions attend to human needs?

Physiological

Safety

Belonging and Love

Esteem

Self-Actualization

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Is Australian Rules football a Religion?

Read the poem written by Australian Poet Bruce Dawe. It makes several references to the concept of Football being a religion…..is it? Read and answer the following questions.

Life Cycle

When children are born in Victoria
they are wrapped in club-colours, laid in beribboned cots,
having already begun a lifetime’s barracking.

Carn, they cry, Carn … feebly at first
while parents playfully tussle with them
for possession of a rusk: Ah, he’s a little Tiger! (And they are …)

Hoisted shoulder-high at their first League game
they are like innocent monsters who have been years swimming
towards the daylight’s roaring empyrean

Until, now, hearts shrapnelled with rapture,
they break surface and are forever lost,
their minds rippling out like streamers

In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice
like the voice of God booms from the stands
Ooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed.

Hot pies and potato-crisps they will eat,
they will forswear the Demons, cling to the Saints
and behold their team going up the ladder into Heaven,

And the tides of life will be the tides of the home-team’s fortunes
- the reckless proposal after the one-point win,
the wedding and honeymoon after the grand final …

They will not grow old as those from the more northern states grow old,
for them it will always be three-quarter time
with the scores level and the wind advantage in the final term,

That passion persisting, like a race-memory, through the welter of seasons,
enabling old-timers by boundary fences to dream of resurgent lions
and centaur-figures from the past to replenish continually the present,

So that mythology may be perpetually renewed
and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god
in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing

But the dance forever the same – the elderly still
loyally crying Carn … Carn … (if feebly) unto the very end,
having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of salvation

1.       Why do some people claim that ‘football is their religion’?

2.       Is this concept plausible? Why/Why Not?

3.       Note in Stanza 1 that the club supported is not one of choice. Is this true of people’s affiliation to a religious tradition?

4.       Note and explain the direct link that Dawe make to religion, for example, “like the voice of God booms from the stand”.  Try to identify three more of these. What is he saying?

5.       To what extend does football inspire strong emotions that could be linked to a religious tradition?

6.       Why would a comparison between football and religion be seen as offensive by some people