History of the word religion

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements^[1]—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.^[2][3] Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine,^[4] sacredness,^[5] faith,^[6] and a supernatural being or beings.^[7]

Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance or public service. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred texts, symbols and holy places, that primarily aim to give life meaning. Religions may contain symbolic tales that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena; some followers believe these to be true stories. Traditionally, both faith and reason have been considered sources of religious beliefs.^[8]

There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide,^[9] though nearly all of them have regionally based, relatively small followings. Four religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism—account for over 77% of the world’s population, and 92% of the world either follows one of those four religions or identifies as nonreligious,^[10] meaning that the remaining 9,000+ faiths account for only 8% of the population combined. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists, and agnostics, although many in the demographic still have various religious beliefs.^[11] A portion of the population, mostly located in Africa and Asia, are members of new religious movements.^[12] Scholars have indicated that global religiosity may be increasing due to religious countries having generally higher birth rates.^[13]

The study of religion comprises a wide variety of academic disciplines, including theology, philosophy of religion, comparative religion, and social scientific studies. Theories of religion offer various explanations for its origins and workings, including the ontological foundations of religious being and belief.^[14]

Concept and etymology

The term religion comes from both Old French and Anglo-Norman (1200s AD) and means respect for sense of right, moral obligation, sanctity, what is sacred, reverence for the gods.^[15][16] It is ultimately derived from the Latin word religiō. According to Roman philosopher Cicero, religiō comes from relegere: re (meaning «again») + lego (meaning «read»), where lego is in the sense of «go over», «choose», or «consider carefully». Contrarily, some modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell have argued that religiō is derived from religare: re (meaning «again») + ligare («bind» or «connect»), which was made prominent by St. Augustine following the interpretation given by Lactantius in Divinae institutiones, IV, 28.^[17][18] The medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: «we hear of the ‘religion’ of the Golden Fleece, of a knight ‘of the religion of Avys'».^[19]

Religiō

In classic antiquity, religiō broadly meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty to anything.^[20] In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religiō was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge.^[21][22] In general, religiō referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God.^[23] Religiō was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, or fear, as well as feelings of being bound, restricted, or inhibited.^[24] The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus (which meant «very precisely»), and some Roman authors related the term superstitio (which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame) to religiō at times.^[24] When religiō came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of «life bound by monastic vows» or monastic orders.^[19][23] The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious and worldly things were separated, was not used before the 1500s.^[23] The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities; the Peace of Augsburg marks such instance,^[23] which has been described by Christian Reus-Smit as «the first step on the road toward a European system of sovereign states.»^[25]

Roman general Julius Caesar used religiō to mean «obligation of an oath» when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors.^[26] Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used the term religiō to describe the apparent respect given by elephants to the night sky.^[27] Cicero used religiō as being related to cultum deorum (worship of the gods).^[28]

Threskeia

In Ancient Greece, the Greek term threskeia (θρησκεία) was loosely translated into Latin as religiō in late antiquity. Threskeia was sparsely used in classical Greece but became more frequently used in the writings of Josephus in the 1st century AD. It was used in mundane contexts and could mean multiple things from respectful fear to excessive or harmfully distracting practices of others, to cultic practices. It was often contrasted with the Greek word deisidaimonia, which meant too much fear.^[29]

Religion and religions

The modern concept of religion, as an abstraction that entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines, is a recent invention in the English language. Such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to events such as the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and globalization in the Age of Exploration, which involved contact with numerous foreign cultures with non-European languages.^[21][22][30] Some argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply the term religion to non-Western cultures,^[31][32] while some followers of various faiths rebuke using the word to describe their own belief system.^[33]

The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,^[34][35] despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written.^[36][37] For example, there is no precise equivalent of religion in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities.^[38] One of its central concepts is halakha, meaning the walk or path sometimes translated as law, which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life.^[39] Even though the beliefs and traditions of Judaism are found in the ancient world, ancient Jews saw Jewish identity as being about an ethnic or national identity and did not entail a compulsory belief system or regulated rituals.^[40] In the 1st century AD, Josephus had used the Greek term ioudaismos (Judaism) as an ethnic term and was not linked to modern abstract concepts of religion or a set of beliefs.^[3] The very concept of «Judaism» was invented by the Christian Church,^[41] and it was in the 19th century that Jews began to see their ancestral culture as a religion analogous to Christianity.^[40] The Greek word threskeia, which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus, is found in the New Testament. Threskeia is sometimes translated as «religion» in today’s translations, but the term was understood as generic «worship» well into the medieval period.^[3] In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated as religion in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed din as «law».^[3]

The Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as religion,^[42] also means law. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between imperial law and universal or Buddha law, but these later became independent sources of power.^[43][44]

Though traditions, sacred texts, and practices have existed throughout time, most cultures did not align with Western conceptions of religion since they did not separate everyday life from the sacred. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and world religions first entered the English language.^[45][46][47] Native Americans were also thought of as not having religions and also had no word for religion in their languages either.^[46][48] No one self-identified as a Hindu or Buddhist or other similar terms before the 1800s.^[49] «Hindu» has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.^[50][51] Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of religion since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this idea.^[52][53]

According to the philologist Max Müller in the 19th century, the root of the English word religion, the Latin religiō, was originally used to mean only reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety (which Cicero further derived to mean diligence).^[54][55] Müller characterized many other cultures around the world, including Egypt, Persia, and India, as having a similar power structure at this point in history. What is called ancient religion today, they would have only called law.^[56]

Definition

Scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. There are, however, two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical.^{[57][58][59][60][61]}

Modern Western

The concept of religion originated in the modern era in the West.^[32] Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages.^[3][23] Scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition.^[62][63] Others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures.^[31][32]

An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the essence of religion.^[64] They observe that the way the concept today is used is a particularly modern construct that would not have been understood through much of history and in many cultures outside the West (or even in the West until after the Peace of Westphalia).^[65] The MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions states:

The very attempt to define religion, to find some distinctive or possibly unique essence or set of qualities that distinguish the religious from the remainder of human life, is primarily a Western concern. The attempt is a natural consequence of the Western speculative, intellectualistic, and scientific disposition. It is also the product of the dominant Western religious mode, what is called the Judeo-Christian climate or, more accurately, the theistic inheritance from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The theistic form of belief in this tradition, even when downgraded culturally, is formative of the dichotomous Western view of religion. That is, the basic structure of theism is essentially a distinction between a transcendent deity and all else, between the creator and his creation, between God and man.^[66]

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as a

… system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.»^[67]

Alluding perhaps to Tylor’s «deeper motive», Geertz remarked that

… we have very little idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished. We just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature to demonstrate it.^[68]

The theologian Antoine Vergote took the term supernatural simply to mean whatever transcends the powers of nature or human agency. He also emphasized the cultural reality of religion, which he defined as

… the entirety of the linguistic expressions, emotions and, actions and signs that refer to a supernatural being or supernatural beings.^[7]

Peter Mandaville and Paul James intended to get away from the modernist dualisms or dichotomous understandings of immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and sacredness/secularity. They define religion as

… a relatively-bounded system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence, and in which communion with others and Otherness is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing.^[69]

According to the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions, there is an experiential aspect to religion which can be found in almost every culture:

… almost every known culture [has] a depth dimension in cultural experiences … toward some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life. When more or less distinct patterns of behavior are built around this depth dimension in a culture, this structure constitutes religion in its historically recognizable form. Religion is the organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience—varied in form, completeness, and clarity in accordance with the environing culture.^[70]

Classical

Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as «the feeling of absolute dependence».^[71]

His contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as «the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit.»^[72]

Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion in 1871 as «the belief in spiritual beings».^[73] He argued that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, and thus «has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them». He also argued that the belief in spiritual beings exists in all known societies.

In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James defined religion as «the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine».^[4] By the term divine James meant «any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not»^[74] to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.^[75]

Sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his seminal book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, defined religion as a «unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things».^[5] By sacred things he meant things «set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them». Sacred things are not, however, limited to gods or spirits.^{[note 1]} On the contrary, a sacred thing can be «a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred».^[76] Religious beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are the representations that express the nature of these sacred things, and the virtues and powers which are attributed to them.^[77]

Echoes of James’ and Durkheim’s definitions are to be found in the writings of, for example, Frederick Ferré who defined religion as «one’s way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively».^[78] Similarly, for the theologian Paul Tillich, faith is «the state of being ultimately concerned»,^[6] which «is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man’s spiritual life.»^[79]

When religion is seen in terms of sacred, divine, intensive valuing, or ultimate concern, then it is possible to understand why scientific findings and philosophical criticisms (e.g., those made by Richard Dawkins) do not necessarily disturb its adherents.^[80]

Aspects

Beliefs

Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs. The interplay between faith and reason, and their use as perceived support for religious beliefs, have been a subject of interest to philosophers and theologians.^[8] The origin of religious belief as such is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams.^[81]

Mythology

The word myth has several meanings.

1. A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon;
2. A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
3. A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being.^[82]

Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called myths in the anthropology of religion. The term myth can be used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. By defining another person’s religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one’s own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked, «Mythology is often thought of as other people’s religions, and religion can be defined as misinterpreted mythology.»^[83]

In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group, whether or not it is objectively or provably true.^[84] Examples include the resurrection of their real-life founder Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin, is symbolic of the power of life over death, and is also said to be a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old life and the start of a new life is most significant. Religious believers may or may not accept such symbolic interpretations.

Practices

The practices of a religion may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration of a deity (god or goddess), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, religious music, religious art, sacred dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture.^[85]

Religions have a societal basis, either as a living tradition which is carried by lay participants, or with an organized clergy, and a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership.

Academic study

A number of disciplines study the phenomenon of religion: theology, comparative religion, history of religion, evolutionary origin of religions, anthropology of religion, psychology of religion (including neuroscience of religion and evolutionary psychology of religion), law and religion, and sociology of religion.

Daniel L. Pals mentions eight classical theories of religion, focusing on various aspects of religion: animism and magic, by E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer; the psycho-analytic approach of Sigmund Freud; and further Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz.^[86]

Michael Stausberg gives an overview of contemporary theories of religion, including cognitive and biological approaches.^[87]

Theories

Sociological and anthropological theories of religion generally attempt to explain the origin and function of religion.^[88] These theories define what they present as universal characteristics of religious belief and practice.

Origins and development

The origin of religion is uncertain. There are a number of theories regarding the subsequent origins of religious practices.

According to anthropologists John Monaghan and Peter Just, «Many of the great world religions appear to have begun as revitalization movements of some sort, as the vision of a charismatic prophet fires the imaginations of people seeking a more comprehensive answer to their problems than they feel is provided by everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have emerged at many times and places in the world. It seems that the key to long-term success—and many movements come and go with little long-term effect—has relatively little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising regularity, but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who are able to institutionalize the movement.»^[89]

The development of religion has taken different forms in different cultures. Some religions place an emphasis on belief, while others emphasize practice. Some religions focus on the subjective experience of the religious individual, while others consider the activities of the religious community to be most important. Some religions claim to be universal, believing their laws and cosmology to be binding for everyone, while others are intended to be practiced only by a closely defined or localized group. In many places, religion has been associated with public institutions such as education, hospitals, the family, government, and political hierarchies.^[90]

Anthropologists John Monoghan and Peter Just state that, «it seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal with problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and intolerable. One important way in which religious beliefs accomplish this is by providing a set of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortune.»^[90]

Cultural system

While religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion, used in religious studies courses, was proposed by Clifford Geertz, who simply called it a «cultural system».^[91] A critique of Geertz’s model by Talal Asad categorized religion as «an anthropological category».^[92] Richard Niebuhr’s (1894–1962) five-fold classification of the relationship between Christ and culture, however, indicates that religion and culture can be seen as two separate systems, though with some interplay.^[93]

One modern academic theory of religion, social constructionism, says that religion is a modern concept that suggests all spiritual practice and worship follows a model similar to the Abrahamic religions as an orientation system that helps to interpret reality and define human beings.^[94] Among the main proponents of this theory of religion are Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Talal Asad, and Jason Ānanda Josephson. The social constructionists argue that religion is a modern concept that developed from Christianity and was then applied inappropriately to non-Western cultures.

Cognitive science

Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences.^[95] The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range of disciplines, including: cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, zoology, and ethology. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

Hallucinations and delusions related to religious content occurs in about 60% of people with schizophrenia. While this number varies across cultures, this had led to theories about a number of influential religious phenomena and possible relation to psychotic disorders. A number of prophetic experiences are consistent with psychotic symptoms, although retrospective diagnoses are practically impossible.^[96][97][98] Schizophrenic episodes are also experienced by people who do not have belief in gods.^[99]

Religious content is also common in temporal lobe epilepsy, and obsessive–compulsive disorder.^[100][101] Atheistic content is also found to be common with temporal lobe epilepsy.^[102]

Comparativism

Comparative religion is the branch of the study of religions concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices of the world’s religions. In general, the comparative study of religion yields a deeper understanding of the fundamental philosophical concerns of religion such as ethics, metaphysics, and the nature and form of salvation. Studying such material is meant to give one a richer and more sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine.^[103]

In the field of comparative religion, a common geographical classification^[104] of the main world religions includes Middle Eastern religions (including Zoroastrianism and Iranian religions), Indian religions, East Asian religions, African religions, American religions, Oceanic religions, and classical Hellenistic religions.^[104]

Classification

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic practice of comparative religion divided religious belief into philosophically defined categories called world religions. Some academics studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories:

1. world religions, a term which refers to transcultural, international religions;
2. indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or nation-specific religious groups; and
3. new religious movements, which refers to recently developed religions.^[105]

Some recent scholarship has argued that not all types of religion are necessarily separated by mutually exclusive philosophies, and furthermore that the utility of ascribing a practice to a certain philosophy, or even calling a given practice religious, rather than cultural, political, or social in nature, is limited.^{[106][107][108]} The current state of psychological study about the nature of religiousness suggests that it is better to refer to religion as a largely invariant phenomenon that should be distinguished from cultural norms (i.e. religions).^{[109][clarification needed]}

Morphological classification

Some scholars classify religions as either universal religions that seek worldwide acceptance and actively look for new converts, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Jainism, while ethnic religions are identified with a particular ethnic group and do not seek converts.^[110][111] Others reject the distinction, pointing out that all religious practices, whatever their philosophical origin, are ethnic because they come from a particular culture.^{[112][113][114]}

Demographic classification

The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism) and traditional folk religion.

Five largest religions	2015 (billion)[115]	2015 (%)	Demographics
Christianity	2.3	31.2%	Christianity by country
Islam	1.8	24.1%	Islam by country
Hinduism	1.1	15.1%	Hinduism by country
Buddhism	0.5	6.9%	Buddhism by country
Folk Religion	0.4	5.7%
Total	6.1	83%	Religions by country

A global poll in 2012 surveyed 57 countries and reported that 59% of the world’s population identified as religious, 23% as not religious, 13% as convinced atheists, and also a 9% decrease in identification as religious when compared to the 2005 average from 39 countries.^[116] A follow-up poll in 2015 found that 63% of the globe identified as religious, 22% as not religious, and 11% as convinced atheists.^[117] On average, women are more religious than men.^[118] Some people follow multiple religions or multiple religious principles at the same time, regardless of whether or not the religious principles they follow traditionally allow for syncretism.^{[119][120][121]} A 2017 Pew projection suggests that Islam will overtake Christianity as the plurality religion by 2075. Unaffiliated populations are projected to drop, even when taking disaffiliation rates into account, due to differences in birth rates.^[122][123]

Scholars have indicated that global religiosity may be increasing due to religious countries having higher birth rates in general.^[124]

Specific religions

Abrahamic

Abrahamic religions are monotheistic religions which believe they descend from Abraham.

Judaism

Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion, originating in the people of ancient Israel and Judah.^[125] The Torah is its foundational text, and is part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. It is supplemented by oral tradition, set down in written form in later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud. Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Within Judaism there are a variety of movements, most of which emerged from Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of both the Written and Oral Torah; historically, this assertion was challenged by various groups. The Jewish people were scattered after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Today there are about 13 million Jews, about 40 per cent living in Israel and 40 per cent in the United States.^[126] The largest Jewish religious movements are Orthodox Judaism (Haredi Judaism and Modern Orthodox Judaism), Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism.^[125]

Christianity

Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (1st century) as presented in the New Testament.^[127] The Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ,^[127] the Son of God, and as Savior and Lord. Almost all Christians believe in the Trinity, which teaches the unity of Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. Most Christians can describe their faith with the Nicene Creed. As the religion of Byzantine Empire in the first millennium and of Western Europe during the time of colonization, Christianity has been propagated throughout the world via missionary work.^{[128][129][130]} It is the world’s largest religion, with about 2.3 billion followers as of 2015.^[131] The main divisions of Christianity are, according to the number of adherents:^[132]

• The Catholic Church, led by the Bishop of Rome and the bishops worldwide in communion with him, is a communion of 24 Churches sui iuris, including the Latin Church and 23 Eastern Catholic churches, such as the Maronite Catholic Church.^[132]
• Eastern Christianity, which include Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East.
• Protestantism, separated from the Catholic Church in the 16th-century Protestant Reformation and is split into thousands of denominations. Major branches of Protestantism include Anglicanism, Baptists, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Methodism, though each of these contain many different denominations or groups.^[132]

There are also smaller groups, including:

• Restorationism, the belief that Christianity should be restored (as opposed to reformed) along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church.
• Latter-day Saint movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the late 1820s.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses, founded in the late 1870s by Charles Taze Russell.

Islam

Islam is a monotheistic^[133] religion based on the Quran,^[133] one of the holy books considered by Muslims to be revealed by God, and on the teachings (hadith) of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a major political and religious figure of the 7th century CE. Islam is based on the unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all of the Abrahamic prophets of Judaism, Christianity and other Abrahamic religions before Muhammad. It is the most widely practiced religion of Southeast Asia, North Africa, Western Asia, and Central Asia, while Muslim-majority countries also exist in parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Europe. There are also several Islamic republics, including Iran, Pakistan, Mauritania, and Afghanistan.

• Sunni Islam is the largest denomination within Islam and follows the Qur’an, the ahadith (ar: plural of Hadith) which record the sunnah, whilst placing emphasis on the sahabah.
• Shia Islam is the second largest denomination of Islam and its adherents believe that Ali succeeded Muhammad and further places emphasis on Muhammad’s family.
• There are also Muslim revivalist movements such as Muwahhidism and Salafism.

Other denominations of Islam include Nation of Islam, Ibadi, Sufism, Quranism, Mahdavia, and non-denominational Muslims. Wahhabism is the dominant Muslim schools of thought in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Other

Whilst Judaism, Christianity and Islam are commonly seen as the only three Abrahamic faiths, there are smaller and newer traditions which lay claim to the designation as well.^[134]

For example, the Baháʼí Faith is a new religious movement that has links to the major Abrahamic religions as well as other religions (e.g. of Eastern philosophy). Founded in 19th-century Iran, it teaches the unity of all religious philosophies^[135] and accepts all of the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as additional prophets (Buddha, Mahavira), including its founder Bahá’u’lláh. It is an offshoot of Bábism. One of its divisions is the Orthodox Baháʼí Faith.^{[136]: 48–49}

Even smaller regional Abrahamic groups also exist, including Samaritanism (primarily in Israel and the State of Palestine), the Rastafari movement (primarily in Jamaica), and Druze (primarily in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel). The Druze faith originally developed out of Isma’ilism, and it has sometimes been considered an Islamic school by some Islamic authorities, but Druze themselves do not identify as Muslims.^{[137][138][139]} Mandaeism, sometimes also known as Sabianism (after the mysterious Sabians mentioned in the Quran, a name historically claimed by several religious groups),^[140] is a Gnostic, monotheistic and ethnic religion.^{[141]: 4 [142]: 1} Its adherents, the Mandaeans, consider John the Baptist to be their chief prophet.^[141] Mandaeans are the last surviving Gnostics from antiquity.^[143]

East Asian

East Asian religions (also known as Far Eastern religions or Taoic religions) consist of several religions of East Asia which make use of the concept of Tao (in Chinese), Dō (in Japanese or Korean) or Đạo (in Vietnamese). They include:

Taoism and Confucianism

• Taoism and Confucianism, as well as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese religion influenced by Chinese thought.

Folk religions

• Chinese folk religion: the indigenous religions of the Han Chinese, or, by metonymy, of all the populations of the Chinese cultural sphere. It includes the syncretism of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, Wuism, as well as many new religious movements such as Chen Tao, Falun Gong and Yiguandao.
• Other folk and new religions of East Asia and Southeast Asia such as Korean shamanism, Chondogyo, and Jeung San Do in Korea; indigenous Philippine folk religions in the Philippines; Shinto, Shugendo, Ryukyuan religion, and Japanese new religions in Japan; Satsana Phi in Laos; Vietnamese folk religion, and Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo in Vietnam.

Indian religions

Indian religions are practiced or were founded in the Indian subcontinent. They are sometimes classified as the dharmic religions, as they all feature dharma, the specific law of reality and duties expected according to the religion.^[144]

Hinduism

• Hinduism is also called Vaidika Dharma, the dharma of the Vedas.^[145] It is a synecdoche describing the similar philosophies of Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and related groups practiced or founded in the Indian subcontinent. Concepts most of them share in common include karma, caste, reincarnation, mantras, yantras, and darśana.^{[note 2]} Hinduism is one of the most ancient of still-active religious belief systems,^[146][147] with origins perhaps as far back as prehistoric times.^[148]

Jainism

• Jainism, taught primarily by Rishabhanatha (the founder of ahimsa) is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence, truth and anekantavada for all forms of living beings in this universe; which helps them to eliminate all the Karmas, and hence to attain freedom from the cycle of birth and death (saṃsāra), that is, achieving nirvana. Jains are found mostly in India. According to Dundas, outside of the Jain tradition, historians date the Mahavira as about contemporaneous with the Buddha in the 5th-century BCE, and accordingly the historical Parshvanatha, based on the c. 250-year gap, is placed in 8th or 7th century BCE.^[150]
  • Digambara Jainism (or sky-clad) is mainly practiced in South India. Their holy books are Pravachanasara and Samayasara written by their Prophets Kundakunda and Amritchandra as their original canon is lost.
  • Shwetambara Jainism (or white-clad) is mainly practiced in Western India. Their holy books are Jain Agamas, written by their Prophet Sthulibhadra.

Buddhism

• Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th century BCE. Buddhists generally agree that Gotama aimed to help sentient beings end their suffering (dukkha) by understanding the true nature of phenomena, thereby escaping the cycle of suffering and rebirth (saṃsāra), that is, achieving nirvana.
  • Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced mainly in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia alongside folk religion, shares some characteristics of Indian religions. It is based in a large collection of texts called the Pali Canon.
  • Mahayana Buddhism (or the Great Vehicle) under which are a multitude of doctrines that became prominent in China and are still relevant in Vietnam, Korea, Japan and to a lesser extent in Europe and the United States. Mahayana Buddhism includes such disparate teachings as Zen, Pure Land, and Soka Gakkai.
  • Vajrayana Buddhism first appeared in India in the 3rd century CE.^[151] It is currently most prominent in the Himalaya regions^[152] and extends across all of Asia^[153] (cf. Mikkyō).
  • Two notable new Buddhist sects are Hòa Hảo and the Navayana (Dalit Buddhist movement), which were developed separately in the 20th century.

Sikhism

• Sikhism is a panentheistic religion founded on the teachings of Guru Nanak and ten successive Sikh gurus in 15th-century Punjab. It is the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, with approximately 30 million Sikhs.^[154][155] Sikhs are expected to embody the qualities of a Sant-Sipāhī—a saint-soldier, have control over one’s internal vices and be able to be constantly immersed in virtues clarified in the Guru Granth Sahib. The principal beliefs of Sikhi are faith in Waheguru—represented by the phrase ik ōaṅkār, meaning one God, who prevails in everything, along with a praxis in which the Sikh is enjoined to engage in social reform through the pursuit of justice for all human beings.

Indigenous and folk

Indigenous religions or folk religions refers to a broad category of traditional religions that can be characterised by shamanism, animism and ancestor worship, where traditional means «indigenous, that which is aboriginal or foundational, handed down from generation to generation…».^[156] These are religions that are closely associated with a particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe; they often have no formal creeds or sacred texts.^[157] Some faiths are syncretic, fusing diverse religious beliefs and practices.^[158]

• Australian Aboriginal religions.
• Folk religions of the Americas: Native American religions

Folk religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where they are widely practiced, e.g. in China.^[157]

Traditional African

African traditional religion encompasses the traditional religious beliefs of people in Africa. In West Africa, these religions include the Akan religion, Dahomey (Fon) mythology, Efik mythology, Odinani, Serer religion (A ƭat Roog), and Yoruba religion, while Bushongo mythology, Mbuti (Pygmy) mythology, Lugbara mythology, Dinka religion, and Lotuko mythology come from central Africa. Southern African traditions include Akamba mythology, Masai mythology, Malagasy mythology, San religion, Lozi mythology, Tumbuka mythology, and Zulu mythology. Bantu mythology is found throughout central, southeast, and southern Africa. In north Africa, these traditions include Berber and ancient Egyptian.

There are also notable African diasporic religions practiced in the Americas, such as Santeria, Candomble, Vodun, Lucumi, Umbanda, and Macumba.

Iranian

Iranian religions are ancient religions whose roots predate the Islamization of Greater Iran. Nowadays these religions are practiced only by minorities.

Zoroastrianism is based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster in the 6th century BCE. Zoroastrians worship the creator Ahura Mazda. In Zoroastrianism, good and evil have distinct sources, with evil trying to destroy the creation of Mazda, and good trying to sustain it.

Kurdish religions include the traditional beliefs of the Yazidi,^[159][160] Alevi, and Ahl-e Haqq. Sometimes these are labeled Yazdânism.

New religious movements

• The Baháʼí Faith teaches the unity of all religious philosophies.^[135]
• Cao Đài is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, established in Vietnam in 1926.^[161]
• Eckankar is a pantheistic religion with the purpose of making God an everyday reality in one’s life.^[162]
• Epicureanism is a Hellenistic philosophy that is considered by many of its practitioners as a type of (sometimes non-theistic) religious identity. It has its own scriptures, a monthly «feast of reason» on the Twentieth, and considers friendship to be holy.
• Hindu reform movements, such as Ayyavazhi, Swaminarayan Faith and Ananda Marga, are examples of new religious movements within Indian religions.
• Japanese new religions (shinshukyo) is a general category for a wide variety of religious movements founded in Japan since the 19th century. These movements share almost nothing in common except the place of their founding. The largest religious movements centered in Japan include Soka Gakkai, Tenrikyo, and Seicho-No-Ie among hundreds of smaller groups.^[163]
• Jehovah’s Witnesses, a non-trinitarian Christian Reformist movement sometimes described as millenarian.^[164]
• Neo-Druidism is a religion promoting harmony with nature,^[165] named after but not necessarily connected to the Iron Age druids.^[166]
• Modern pagan movements attempting to reconstruct or revive ancient pagan practices, such as Heathenry, Hellenism, and Kemeticism^[167]
• Noahidism is a monotheistic ideology based on the Seven Laws of Noah,^[168] and on their traditional interpretations within Rabbinic Judaism.
• Some forms of parody religion or fiction-based religion^[169] like Jediism, Pastafarianism, Dudeism, «Tolkien religion»,^[169] and others often develop their own writings, traditions, and cultural expressions, and end up behaving like traditional religions.
• Satanism is a broad category of religions that, for example, worship Satan as a deity (Theistic Satanism) or use Satan as a symbol of carnality and earthly values (LaVeyan Satanism and The Satanic Temple).^[170]
• Scientology^[171] is a religious movement that teaches that people are immortal beings who have forgotten their true nature. Its method of spiritual rehabilitation is a type of counseling known as auditing, in which practitioners aim to consciously re-experience and understand painful or traumatic events and decisions in their past in order to free themselves of their limiting effects.
• UFO Religions in which extraterrestrial entities are an element of belief, such as Raëlism, Aetherius Society, and Marshall Vian Summers’s New Message from God
• Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and has no accepted creed or theology.^[172]
• Wicca is a neo-pagan religion first popularised in 1954 by British civil servant Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of a God and Goddess.^[173]

Law

The study of law and religion is a relatively new field, with several thousand scholars involved in law schools, and academic departments including political science, religion, and history since 1980.^[174] Scholars in the field are not only focused on strictly legal issues about religious freedom or non-establishment, but also study religions as they are qualified through judicial discourses or legal understanding of religious phenomena. Exponents look at canon law, natural law, and state law, often in a comparative perspective.^[175][176] Specialists have explored themes in Western history regarding Christianity and justice and mercy, rule and equity, and discipline and love.^[177] Common topics of interest include marriage and the family^[178] and human rights.^[179] Outside of Christianity, scholars have looked at law and religion links in the Muslim Middle East^[180] and pagan Rome.^[181]

Studies have focused on secularization.^[182][183] In particular, the issue of wearing religious symbols in public, such as headscarves that are banned in French schools, have received scholarly attention in the context of human rights and feminism.^[184]

Science

Science acknowledges reason and empirical evidence; and religions include revelation, faith and sacredness whilst also acknowledging philosophical and metaphysical explanations with regard to the study of the universe. Both science and religion are not monolithic, timeless, or static because both are complex social and cultural endeavors that have changed through time across languages and cultures.^[185]

The concepts of science and religion are a recent invention: the term religion emerged in the 17th century in the midst of colonization and globalization and the Protestant Reformation.^[3][21] The term science emerged in the 19th century out of natural philosophy in the midst of attempts to narrowly define those who studied nature (natural science),^{[21][186][187]} and the phrase religion and science emerged in the 19th century due to the reification of both concepts.^[21] It was in the 19th century that the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism first emerged.^[21] In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin roots of both science (scientia) and religion (religio) were understood as inner qualities of the individual or virtues, never as doctrines, practices, or actual sources of knowledge.^[21]

In general the scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by experiments and thus only answers cosmological questions about the universe that can be observed and measured. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement, or even rejection, in the face of additional evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as de facto verities in general parlance, such as the theories of general relativity and natural selection to explain respectively the mechanisms of gravity and evolution.

Religion does not have a method per se partly because religions emerge through time from diverse cultures and it is an attempt to find meaning in the world, and to explain humanity’s place in it and relationship to it and to any posited entities. In terms of Christian theology and ultimate truths, people rely on reason, experience, scripture, and tradition to test and gauge what they experience and what they should believe. Furthermore, religious models, understanding, and metaphors are also revisable, as are scientific models.^[188]

Regarding religion and science, Albert Einstein states (1940): «For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.^[189] Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action; it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts^[189]…Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determine the goals, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up.»^[190]

Morality

Many religions have value frameworks regarding personal behavior meant to guide adherents in determining between right and wrong. These include the Triple Jems of Jainism, Judaism’s Halacha, Islam’s Sharia, Catholicism’s Canon Law, Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, and Zoroastrianism’s good thoughts, good words, and good deeds concept, among others.^[191]

Religion and morality are not synonymous. While it is «an almost automatic assumption,»^[192] in Christianity, morality can have a secular basis.

The study of religion and morality can be contentious due to ethnocentric views on morality, failure to distinguish between in group and out group altruism, and inconsistent definitions of religiosity.

Politics

Impact

Religion has had a significant impact on the political system in many countries.^[193] Notably, most Muslim-majority countries adopt various aspects of sharia, the Islamic law.^[194] Some countries even define themselves in religious terms, such as The Islamic Republic of Iran. The sharia thus affects up to 23% of the global population, or 1.57 billion people who are Muslims. However, religion also affects political decisions in many western countries. For instance, in the United States, 51% of voters would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in God, and only 6% more likely.^[195] Christians make up 92% of members of the US Congress, compared with 71% of the general public (as of 2014). At the same time, while 23% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, only one member of Congress (Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona), or 0.2% of that body, claims no religious affiliation.^[196] In most European countries, however, religion has a much smaller influence on politics^[197] although it used to be much more important. For instance, same-sex marriage and abortion were illegal in many European countries until recently, following Christian (usually Catholic) doctrine. Several European leaders are atheists (e.g. France’s former president Francois Hollande or Greece’s prime minister Alexis Tsipras). In Asia, the role of religion differs widely between countries. For instance, India is still one of the most religious countries and religion still has a strong impact on politics, given that Hindu nationalists have been targeting minorities like the Muslims and the Christians, who historically^[when?] belonged to the lower castes.^[198] By contrast, countries such as China or Japan are largely secular and thus religion has a much smaller impact on politics.

Secularism

Secularization is the transformation of the politics of a society from close identification with a particular religion’s values and institutions toward nonreligious values and secular institutions. The purpose of this is frequently modernization or protection of the populations religious diversity.

Economics

One study has found there is a negative correlation between self-defined religiosity and the wealth of nations.^[199] In other words, the richer a nation is, the less likely its inhabitants to call themselves religious, whatever this word means to them (Many people identify themselves as part of a religion (not irreligion) but do not self-identify as religious).^[199]

Sociologist and political economist Max Weber has argued that Protestant Christian countries are wealthier because of their Protestant work ethic.^[200] According to a study from 2015, Christians hold the largest amount of wealth (55% of the total world wealth), followed by Muslims (5.8%), Hindus (3.3%) and Jews (1.1%). According to the same study it was found that adherents under the classification Irreligion or other religions hold about 34.8% of the total global wealth (while making up only about 20% of the world population, see section on classification).^[201]

Health

Mayo Clinic researchers examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality, and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life, and other health outcomes.^[202] The authors reported that: «Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide.»^[203]

The authors of a subsequent study concluded that the influence of religion on health is largely beneficial, based on a review of related literature.^[204] According to academic James W. Jones, several studies have discovered «positive correlations between religious belief and practice and mental and physical health and longevity.»^[205]

An analysis of data from the 1998 US General Social Survey, whilst broadly confirming that religious activity was associated with better health and well-being, also suggested that the role of different dimensions of spirituality/religiosity in health is rather more complicated. The results suggested «that it may not be appropriate to generalize findings about the relationship between spirituality/religiosity and health from one form of spirituality/religiosity to another, across denominations, or to assume effects are uniform for men and women.^[206]

Violence

Critics like Hector Avalos^[207] Regina Schwartz,^[208] Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have argued that religions are inherently violent and harmful to society by using violence to promote their goals, in ways that are endorsed and exploited by their leaders.^{[209][page needed][210][page needed]}

Anthropologist Jack David Eller asserts that religion is not inherently violent, arguing «religion and violence are clearly compatible, but they are not identical.» He asserts that «violence is neither essential to nor exclusive to religion» and that «virtually every form of religious violence has its nonreligious corollary.»^[211][212]

Animal sacrifice

Some (but not all) religions practise animal sacrifice, the ritual killing and offering of an animal to appease or maintain favour with a deity. It has been banned in India.^[213]

Superstition

Greek and Roman pagans, who saw their relations with the gods in political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods (deisidaimonia), as a slave might fear a cruel and capricious master. The Romans called such fear of the gods superstitio.^[214] Ancient Greek historian Polybius described superstition in ancient Rome as an instrumentum regni, an instrument of maintaining the cohesion of the Empire.^[215]

Superstition has been described as the non-rational establishment of cause and effect.^[216] Religion is more complex and is often composed of social institutions and has a moral aspect. Some religions may include superstitions or make use of magical thinking. Adherents of one religion sometimes think of other religions as superstition.^[217][218] Some atheists, deists, and skeptics regard religious belief as superstition.

The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that superstition «in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion» (para. #2110). «Superstition,» it says, «is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16–22» (para. #2111)

Agnosticism and atheism

The terms atheist (lack of belief in any gods) and agnostic (belief in the unknowability of the existence of gods), though specifically contrary to theistic (e.g. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) religious teachings, do not by definition mean the opposite of religious. There are religions (including Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism), in fact, that classify some of their followers as agnostic, atheistic, or nontheistic. The true opposite of religious is the word irreligious. Irreligion describes an absence of any religion; antireligion describes an active opposition or aversion toward religions in general.

Interfaith cooperation

Because religion continues to be recognized in Western thought as a universal impulse,^[219] many religious practitioners^[who?][220] have aimed to band together in interfaith dialogue, cooperation, and religious peacebuilding. The first major dialogue was the Parliament of the World’s Religions at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which affirmed universal values and recognition of the diversity of practices among different cultures.^[221] The 20th century has been especially fruitful in use of interfaith dialogue as a means of solving ethnic, political, or even religious conflict, with Christian–Jewish reconciliation representing a complete reverse in the attitudes of many Christian communities towards Jews.^[222]

Recent interfaith initiatives include A Common Word, launched in 2007 and focused on bringing Muslim and Christian leaders together,^[223] the «C1 World Dialogue»,^[224] the Common Ground initiative between Islam and Buddhism,^[225] and a United Nations sponsored «World Interfaith Harmony Week».^[226][227]

Culture

Culture and religion have usually been seen as closely related.^[42] Paul Tillich looked at religion as the soul of culture and culture as the form or framework of religion.^[228] In his own words:

Religion as ultimate concern is the meaning-giving substance of culture, and culture is the totality of forms in which the basic concern of religion expresses itself. In abbreviation: religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion. Such a consideration definitely prevents the establishment of a dualism of religion and culture. Every religious act, not only in organized religion, but also in the most intimate movement of the soul, is culturally formed.^[229]

Ernst Troeltsch, similarly, looked at culture as the soil of religion and thought that, therefore, transplanting a religion from its original culture to a foreign culture would actually kill it in the same manner that transplanting a plant from its natural soil to an alien soil would kill it.^[230] However, there have been many attempts in the modern pluralistic situation to distinguish culture from religion.^[231] Domenic Marbaniang has argued that elements grounded on beliefs of a metaphysical nature (religious) are distinct from elements grounded on nature and the natural (cultural). For instance, language (with its grammar) is a cultural element while sacralization of language in which a particular religious scripture is written is more often a religious practice. The same applies to music and the arts.^[232]

Criticism

Criticism of religion is criticism of the ideas, the truth, or the practice of religion, including its political and social implications.^[233]

See also

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

• Saint Augustine; The Confessions of Saint Augustine (John K. Ryan translator); Image (1960), ISBN 0-385-02955-1.
• Barzilai, Gad; Law and Religion; The International Library of Essays in Law and Society; Ashgate (2007), ISBN 978-0-7546-2494-3
• Bellarmine, Robert (1902). «Sermon 48: The Necessity of Religion.» . Sermons from the Latins. Benziger Brothers.
• James, Paul & Mandaville, Peter (2010). Globalization and Culture, Vol. 2: Globalizing Religions. London: Sage Publications.
• Lang, Andrew; The Making of Religion. Third Edition. Longmans, Green, and Co. (1909).
• Marx, Karl; «Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right», Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, (1844).
• Noss, John B.; Man’s Religions, 6th ed.; Macmillan Publishing Co. (1980). N.B.: The first ed. appeared in 1949, ISBN 9780023884306. OCLC 4665144.
• Inglehart, Ronald F., «Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion», Foreign Affairs, vol. 99, no. 5 (September / October 2020), pp. 110–118.

External links

• Kevin Schilbrack. «The Concept of Religion». In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Religion Statistics from UCB Libraries GovPubs
• Religion at Curlie
• Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents^[Usurped!] by Adherents.com August 2005
• IACSR – International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion
• Studying Religion – Introduction to the methods and scholars of the academic study of religion
• A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Marx’s original reference to religion as the opium of the people.
• The Complexity of Religion and the Definition of «Religion» in International Law – Harvard Human Rights Journal article from the President and Fellows of Harvard College (2003)
• Sociology of Religion Resources
• Video: 5 Religions spreading across the world

Значение и загадочная история происхождения слова «религия»: расследование

Неожиданно для меня, происхождение слова «религия» оказалось настоящей загадкой. Сперва всё было как будто бы просто: Google выдал родословное древо слова religion по первому же запросу. Оказалось, что корнями «религия» уходит в латинский глагол religare.

Латинский глагол religare означает «связывать», «воссоединять». В русской Википедии написано, что religare используется в смысле восстановления разорванной связи между человеком и Богом, ощущении некой связи со всем бытием, имеющим системность и организованность.

Во-первых, объяснение про связь с богом ничего не объясняет — даже если бы это было так, то каким образом это превратилось в дальнейшем в «религию» в современном значении?

Во-вторых, там же написано, что «religio (лат.) – совестливость, добросовестность, благочестие» — всё бы ничего, только это перевод не с латыни, а с древнефранцузского.

Расследование того, откуда на самом возникло слово «религия» в современном значении, уводит более чем на две тысячи лет в прошлое и обнаруживает столкновение двух совершенно разных версий двух значимых древнеримских мыслителей — известного ритора Цицерона и известного богослова Лактанция.

На самом деле, ещё сами римляне начали использовать слово «религия» в современном значении.

В I веке до н.э. Цицерон писал:

Quos deos et venerari et colere debemus, cultus autem deorum est optumus idemque castissimus atque sanctissimus plenissimusque pietatis, ut eos semper pura integra incorrupta et mente et voce veneremur. Non enim philosophi solum verum etiam maiores nostri superstitionem a religione separaverunt.

Последние три слова, superstitionem a religione separaverunt, буквально переводятся как «разница между суевериями и религией».

Это означает, что, в отличие от культуры, где европейцы взяли латинский корень и придумали новое значение слова cultura, опираясь на него — с религией придётся копать глубже и разбирать происхождение этого слова уже в латинском языке.

▍ Почему именно римляне изобрели слово «религия»

Небольшое лирическое отступление: латынь стала первым языком, в которым для понятия, описываемого словом «религия» появился отдельный термин — собственно, «религия».

Довольно любопытная версия причины этого изложена в журнале Forward: в древнем мире религия просто не рассматривалась как отдельная часть окружающего человека мира, пронизывая его реальность во всех аспектах.

И только римляне, которые завоевали половину цивилизаций древнего мира, увидели нечто общее, что объединяет все культы и верования и отделяет их от других аспектов человеческой жизни.

Конечно, римляне не были первыми, кто завоевал множество территорий, населённых народами с разными взглядами.

Но римляне отличались свойственной им тягой к порядку, организации и систематизации, на которой они построили не только свою империю, но и организовали её уникальное внутреннее устройство.

Так что нет ничего удивительного в том, что именно латинский глаз заметил, что всех этих богов, богинь и прочую сверхъестественную живность надо вынести в отдельную категорию классификации. Для порядка.

Происхождения слова «религия» в латыни

Основной современной гипотезой происхождения слова «религия» является образование его от латинского глагола religare. В её поддержку ссылаются на цитату из «Комментариев к «Энеиде» Вергилия» жившего в IV веке н.э. римского филолога Сервия:

religio id est metus, ab eo quod mentem religet dicta religio.

— и христианского богослова Люциуса Лактанция (~245—325 г. н.э.), который в её поддержку привёл строчку из философской поэмы римского поэта Лукреция De rerum natura («О природе вещей»):

religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo

— «освободить разум от религиозных уз».

Согласно этой гипотезе, глагол religare образован из приставки re (означающей повторение) и глагола ligare — формы глагола ligo, произошедшего от праиндоевропейского leyǵ — «связывать».

Однако в легендарном трактате De natura deorum («О природе богов») современника Лукреция Цицерона, «религия» является производной от совсем другого глагола: relegere.

Qui omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter pertractarent, et tamquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo, ut elegantes ex eligendo

Relegere — форма глагола relego, образованного той же приставкой re и глаголом lego, происходящим от праиндоевропейского leǵ, означающего «собирать».

Латинский глагол lego переводится как «собирать, отбирать, читать» — и лёг, ни много ни мало, в основу таких слов, как «интеллект» (intellegō — «понимать»), «лекция» (lēctus — «выборка») и «легенда» (от деепричастной формы legere — legendus).

У religare и relegere нет никакого общего предка, потому что они восходят к двум разным PIE (протоиндоевропейским) корням: *leig «to tie, bind» и *leg «to collect, gather» соответственно.

PIE *leig- и *leg- — это два разных слова, случайное созвучие производных от которых (religare/relegere) и стало основой путаницы в понимании происхождения латинского religio, разбору которой и посвящён этот текст.

И «религия», по Цицерону, который пишет, что религиозными (religiosi) называют людей, которые прочитали всё, что есть прочитать, о том, как правильно поклоняться богам — и соблюдают все обряды.

Чью версию выбрать — Цицерона или Лактантиуса?

Лукреций использует слово religionum во фразе «религиозные суеверия» («Дух человека извлечь из тесных тенёт суеверий» в переводе Петровского).

Цицерон пишет, что «религиозный» (religiosi) — это человек, изучивший канон своей веры и неукоснительно ему следующий. Возникает встречный вопрос: а откуда вообще возникла эта дилемма?

Лукреций и не пытался давать определения слову «религиозный», используя его как есть в строчке об «освобождении от уз религиозных суеверий».

Освобождение от уз (nodis exsolvere) никак не намекает на происхождение самого слова religionum и видеть тут намёк на это смысла не больше, чем выводить происхождение слова «религия» из лозунга «религия — опиум для народа».

Тогда как Цицерон во второй книге своего трактата именно это и делает.

Более того, в расширенной цитате видно, что он, по сути, отвечает на тот же вопрос, которым задаюсь в этой статье и я: чем отличается культ от религии («Точность слов: чем культ отличается от религии»).

На латыни:

[72] nam qui totos dies precabantur et immolabant, ut sibi sui liberi superstites essent, superstitiosi sunt appellati, quod nomen patuit postea latius; qui autem omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter retractarent et tamquam relegerent, [i] sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo, [tamquam] elegantes ex eligendo, [tamquam] [ex] diligendo diligentes, ex intellegendo intellegentes; his enim in verbis omnibus inest vis legendi eadem quae in religioso. ita factum est in superstitioso et religioso alterum vitii nomen alterum laudis. Ac mihi videor satis et esse deos et quales essent ostendisse.

На английском:

72 Persons who spent whole days in prayer and sacrifice to ensure that their children should outlive them were termed ‘superstitious’ (from superstes, a survivor), and the word later acquired a wider application. Those on the other hand who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual were called ‘religious’ from relegere (to retrace or re‑read), like ‘elegant’ from eligere (to select), ‘diligent’ from diligere (to care for), ‘intelligent’ from intellegere (to understand); for all these words contain the same sense of ‘picking out’ (legere) that is present in ‘religious.’ Hence ‘superstitious’ and ‘religious’ came to be terms of censure and approval respectively. I think that I have said enough to prove the existence of the gods and their nature.

Русский перевод:

Ибо те, кото­рые целы­ми дня­ми моли­лись и при­но­си­ли жерт­вы, чтобы их дети пере­жи­ли их (su­persti­ti si­bi es­sent), те были назва­ны суе­вер­ны­ми (su­persti­tio­si), поз­же это назва­ние при­об­ре­ло более широ­кий смысл. А те, кото­рые над всем, что отно­сит­ся к почи­та­нию богов, усерд­но раз­мыш­ля­ли и как бы пере­чи­ты­ва­ли (re­le­ge­rent), были назва­ны рели­ги­оз­ны­ми (re­li­gio­si) (от re­le­ge­re, как ele­gan­tes от eli­ge­re, di­li­gen­tes от di­li­ge­re, как in­tel­le­gen­tes от in­tel­le­ge­re). Ибо во всех этих сло­вах тот же корень (vis le­gen­di), что и в сло­ве re­li­gio­us. Итак, из двух слов “суе­вер­но” и “рели­ги­оз­но” пер­вое ста­ло обо­зна­чать пори­ца­ние, а вто­рое — похва­лу. А теперь, мне кажет­ся, доста­точ­но было пока­за­но и что боги суще­ст­ву­ют, и како­вы они.

Цицерон описал два типа вовлечённых в поклонение сверхъестественных людей: суеверных и религиозных.

• Суеверные люди обладают поверхностным представлением о том, во что верят, находятся в постоянном страхе и низводят свою веру до суеверия.
• Религиозные люди усердно подходят к культу, изучают канон и неукоснительно ему следуют.

Упоминание «религии» уже в современном, по сути, значении, Цицероном бесспорно и куда яснее, чем Лукрецием, несмотря на лоббирование Лактаниусом этой версии.

Как говорил Цицерон

Поэтому невзирая на превалирующее сегодня убеждение в происхождении слова религия от religare, «утверждённого» в выдаче Google, я останавливаюсь на Цицероне в качестве первого письменного источника со словом «религиозный», образованным от глагола relegere.

Первоначальное определение религиозности по Цицерону: глубокое знание, почитание и исполнение обрядов.

Само же слово «религия», очевидно, появляется уже позднее.

И, вполне возможно, что, несмотря на предположительно иные латинские корни, существительное religion всё равно возникает в английском языке периода Middle English (английского средневековья) 1150–1470 гг.

P.S. Кстати, христианский богослов Лактанций отметился ещё на одном историческом поприще, оказавшись одним из самых влиятельных в истории сторонников «плоской Земли».

Ещё античные философы знали, что Земля должна быть шарообразной, и даже посчитали её размеры, но Лактанций их высмеял.

Более того, будучи весьма влиятельной фигурой в христианском мире, прозванный «христианским Цицероном», он заложил фундамент поддержки христианской церковью представлений о плоской земле на целую тысячу лет вперёд — пока они не были окончательно опровергнуты в Эпоху великих географических открытий.

Это совершенно изолированный от этимологии «религия» факт — просто штрихи к портрету.

P.P.S. Ещё более странно, что «теория плоской Земли» каким-то чудом дожила уже до наших дней.

И, хотя её сегодняшние адепты — максимально чудаковатая публика, просто представьте себе: их вера в плоскую землю основана на том, что когда-то это представление поддерживалось Католической церковью.

А в Католическую церковь оно пришло из трудов Лактанция.

Вот такая вот связь поколений.

Unexpectedly for me, the origin of the word “religion” turned out to be a real mystery. At first, everything was seemingly simple: Google returned the genealogy tree of the word religion at the very first request. It turned out that “religion” is rooted in the Latin verb religare.

The Latin verb religare means to bind, to reunite. On Russian Wikipedia it is written that religare is used in the sense of restoring the broken bond between man and God, the feeling of a certain connection with all being, which has a systematic and organized nature.

First, the explanation about the connection with God does not explain anything – even if it were so, how did it later turn into “religion” in the modern sense?

Secondly, in the same place it is written that “religio (lat.) – conscientiousness, conscientiousness, piety” – everything would be fine, only this is not a translation from Latin, but from Old French…

An investigation into where the word “religion” actually originated in its modern meaning takes more than two thousand years into the past and reveals a collision of two completely different versions of two significant ancient Roman thinkers – the famous rhetorician Cicero and the famous theologian Lactantius.

In fact, even the Romans themselves began to use the word “religion” in its modern sense.

In the 1st century BC. Cicero wrote:

Quos deos et venerari et colere debemus, cultus autem deorum est optumus idemque castissimus atque sanctissimus plenissimusque pietatis, ut eos semper pura integra incorrupta et mente et voce veneremur. Non enim philosophi solum verum etiam maiores nostri superstitionem a religione separaverunt.

The last three words, superstitionem a religione separaverunt, literally translate as “the difference between superstition and religion.”

This means that, unlike a culture where Europeans took the Latin root and came up with a new meaning of the word cultura, relying on it – with religion, you will have to dig deeper and disassemble the origin of this word already in Latin.

▍ Why did the Romans invent the word “religion”

A small lyrical digression: Latin became the first language in which a separate term appeared for the concept described by the word “religion” – in fact, “religion”.

A rather curious version of the reason for this is stated in Forward magazine: in the ancient world, religion was simply not considered as a separate part of the world around a person, permeating his reality in all aspects.

And only the Romans, who conquered half of the civilizations of the ancient world, saw something in common that unites all cults and beliefs and separates them from other aspects of human life.

Of course, the Romans were not the first to conquer many territories inhabited by peoples with different views.

But the Romans were distinguished by their characteristic craving for order, organization and systematization, on which they built not only their empire, but also organized its unique internal structure.

So it is not surprising that it was the Latin eye that noticed that all these gods, goddesses and other supernatural living creatures should be taken into a separate category of classification. For order.

The main modern hypothesis of the origin of the word “religion” is its formation from the Latin verb religare. In her support

refer

to a quote from the Commentaries on the Aeneid by Virgil, who lived in the 4th century AD. Roman philologist

Servia

:

religio id est metus, ab eo quod mentem religet dicta religio…

– and a Christian theologian

Lucius Lactantius

(~ 245-325 AD), who in support of her cited a line from the philosophical poem of the Roman poet Lucretius De rerum natura (“On the nature of things”):

religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo

– “free the mind from religious bonds.”

According to this hypothesis, the verb religare is formed from the prefix re (meaning repetition) and the verb ligare, the form of the verb ligo, derived from the Proto-Indo-European leyǵ, “to bind”.

However, in the legendary treatise De natura deorum (“On the nature of the gods”) by a contemporary of Lucretius Cicero, “religion” is derived from a completely different verb: relegere.

Qui omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter pertractarent, et tamquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo, ut elegantes ex eligendo

Relegere is a form of the verb relego, formed by the same prefix re and the verb lego, derived from

Proto-Indo-European leǵ

meaning “to collect.”

The Latin verb lego is translated as “collect, select, read” – and lay, neither more nor less, in the basis of words such as “intelligence” (intellegō – “understand”), “lecture” (lēctus – “sample”) and “legend” (from the adverbial form legere – legendus).

And “religion”, according to Cicero, who writes that religious (religiosi) refers to people who have read everything there is to read, about how to worship the gods correctly – and observe all the rituals.

Whose version should I choose – Cicero or Lactantius?

Lucretius uses the word religionum in the phrase “religious superstition.”

in the translation of Petrovsky

).

Cicero writes that a “religious” (religiosi) is a person who has studied the canon of his faith and strictly follows it. A counter question arises: where did this dilemma come from?

Lucretius did not try to define the word “religious”, using it as it is in the line about “liberation from the bonds of religious superstition.”

Liberation from bonds (nodis exsolvere) does not in any way hint at the origin of the word religionum itself and to see a hint of this meaning here is no more than to deduce the origin of the word “religion” from the slogan “religion is opium for the people.”

Whereas Cicero in the second book of his treatise that is exactly what it does.

Moreover, in the extended quote it is clear that he, in fact, answers the same question that I am asking myself in this article: how does a cult differ from a religion (“Accuracy of words: how cult differs from religion“).

In latin:

[72] nam qui totos dies precabantur et immolabant, ut sibi sui liberi superstites essent, superstitiosi sunt appellati, quod nomen patuit postea latius; qui autem omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter retractarent et tamquam relegerent, [i] sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo, [tamquam] elegantes ex eligendo, [tamquam] [ex] diligendo diligentes, ex intellegendo intellegentes; his enim in verbis omnibus inest vis legendi eadem quae in religioso. ita factum est in superstitioso et religioso alterum vitii nomen alterum laudis. Ac mihi videor satis et esse deos et quales essent ostendisse.

In English:

72 Persons who spent whole days in prayer and sacrifice to ensure that their children should outlive them were termed ‘superstitious’ (from superstes, a survivor), and the word later acquired a wider application. Those on the other hand who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual were called ‘religious’ from relegere (to retrace or re-read), like ‘elegant’ from eligere (to select), ‘diligent’ from diligere (to care for), ‘intelligent’ fromintellegere (to understand); for all these words contain the same sense of ‘picking out’ (legere) that is present in ‘religious.’ Hence ‘superstitious’ and ‘religious’ came to be terms of censure and approval respectively. I think that I have said enough to prove the existence of the gods and their nature.

Russian translation:

For those who prayed all day and made sacrifices so that their children would survive them (superstiti sibi essent), they were called superstitious (superstitiosi), later this name acquired a broader meaning. And those who diligently pondered over everything related to the veneration of the gods and, as it were, reread (relegerent), were called religious (religiosi) (from relegere, like elegantes from eligere, diligentes from diligere, like intellegentes from intellegere). For all these words have the same root (vis legendi) as the word religious. So, of the two words “superstitious” and “religiously,” the first came to mean censure, and the second – praise. And now, it seems to me, enough has been shown and that the gods exist, and what they are.

Cicero described two types of supernatural people involved in worship: superstitious and religious.

• Superstitious people have a superficial idea of ​​what they believe in, are in constant fear and reduce their faith to superstition.
• Religious people diligently approach the cult, study the canon and strictly follow it.

The mention of “religion” already in its modern, in fact, meaning, by Cicero is indisputable and much clearer than Lucretius, despite Lactanius’s lobbying for this version.

As Cicero said

Therefore, despite the prevailing belief today in the origin of the word religion from religare, “approved” in the Google search results, I stop at Cicero as the first written source with the word “religious” derived from the verb relegere.

The original definition of religiosity according to Cicero: deep knowledge, reverence and performance of rituals.

The very same word “religion”, obviously, appears later.

And, it is quite possible that, despite the supposedly different Latin roots, the noun religion still appears in the English language of the Middle English period of 1150-1470.

PS By the way, the Christian theologian Lactantius was noted in another historical field, being one of the most influential supporters of the “flat earth” in history.

Even ancient philosophers knew that the Earth should be spherical, and even calculated its size, but Lactantius ridiculed them.

Moreover, being a very influential figure in the Christian world, nicknamed “Christian Cicero”, he laid the foundation for the Christian church’s support for flat earth ideas for a thousand years to come – until they were finally refuted in the Age of Great Geographical Discoveries.

This fact is completely isolated from the etymology of “religion” – just touches to the portrait.

PPS It is even more strange that the “flat earth theory” by some miracle has survived to this day.

And, although its today’s adherents are the most eccentric audience, just imagine: their belief in a flat earth is based on the fact that this idea was once supported by the Catholic Church.

And it came to the Catholic Church from the writings of Lactantius.

This is the connection between generations.

The term religion (from Latin: religio meaning «bind, connect») denotes a set of common beliefs and practices pertaining to the supernatural (and its relationship to humanity and the cosmos), which are often codified into prayer, ritual, scriptures, and religious law. These beliefs and practices are typically defined in light of a shared canonical vocabulary of venerable traditions, writings, history, and mythology. As religious traditions are often deeply embedded into specific cultural contexts, these traditions often contain moral codes that outline the relationships that a believer is expected to cultivate with respect to themselves, other believers, outsiders, and the supernatural world. Finally, a common element of many religious traditions is the division of the world in two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane.^[1] In this context, religious thought and practice are aimed at delineating and reifying these two disparate realms through personal effort and/or communal ritual.

The social structure of the world’s religious traditions can be roughly placed on continuum based on their respective levels of interpersonal involvement and social engagement. On one end of this scale would be the most inwardly-directed types, such as the desert saints of early Christianity and the ascetics of Hinduism. On the other hand, one would find the religious traditions that are most firmly entrenched in all aspects of personal, social, and juridical life, such as the medieval Catholic Church and the theocratic regimes of some Islamic states. All other religious traditions could be situated somewhere between these two poles. However, the multivalent interplay between the religious and secular spheres has caused some scholars to question the utility of the term «religion,» as they claim that it presents these traditions in «a reified, essentialized fashion, isolated from the political, social, economic, and cultural worlds within which they are embedded.»^[2]

Given its ubiquity in human affairs and world history, religion has been a perennially controversial topic for generations. The subject of religion can induce a range of responses from love, compassion and goodwill, to fear, loathing, and xenophobia. Indeed, religion can be seen as something of a paradox, as it simultaneously contains both humanity’s most sublime moral and spiritual teachings, as well as grim remnants of intolerance and patriarchy that foster hatred and horror. Thus, despite the growing dangers of religious fundamentalism, the world’s religions continue to be treasure chests of spiritual resources for making a positive impact on world affairs.

«Religion» as a Term

Etymology

The English word religion has been in use since the thirteenth century, loaned from Anglo-French religiun (eleventh century), ultimately from the Latin religio, «reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety, the res divinae.«^[3]

The ultimate origins of Latin religio are obscure, though a historically popular derivation suggests that the term emerged from ligare «bind, connect»; likely from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or «to reconnect.» This interpretation is favored by modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell, though it owes its place of prominence to St. Augustine, who used it in his interpretation of Lactantius. Another possibility is derivation from a reduplicated *le-ligare. Another historical interpretation, this one offered by Cicero, connects lego «read,» i.e. re (again) + lego in the sense of «choose,» «go over again» or «consider carefully».^[4]

Definition

The word «Religion» has been defined in a wide variety of manners, with most definitions attempting to find a balance somewhere between overly restrictive categorizations and meaningless generalities. In this quest, a variety of approaches have been employed, including the use formalistic, doctrinal definitions, and the emphasis experiential, emotive, intuitive, valuational and ethical factors. Definitions mostly include:

• a notion of the transcendent or numinous (most important for theistic belief systems
• a cultural or behavioral aspect of ritual, liturgy and organized worship, often involving a priesthood, and societal norms of morality (ethos) and virtue
• a set of myths or sacred truths held in reverence or believed by adherents

Sociologists and anthropologists tend to see religion as an abstract set of ideas, values, or experiences developed as part of a cultural matrix. For example, in George A. Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine, religion does not refer to belief in «God» or a transcendent Absolute. Instead, Lindbeck defines religion as, «a kind of cultural and/or linguistic framework or medium that shapes the entirety of life and thought… it is similar to an idiom that makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments.”^[5] According to this definition, religion refers to one’s primary worldview and how this dictates one’s thoughts and actions.

Other religious scholars have put forward a definition of religion that avoids the reductionism of the various sociological and psychological disciplines that reduce religion to its component factors. Religion may be defined as the presence of a belief in the sacred or the holy. For example Rudolf Otto’s «The Idea of the Holy,» formulated in 1917,^[6] defines the essence of religious awareness as awe, a unique blend of fear and fascination before the divine. Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late eighteenth century defined religion as a «feeling of absolute dependence.»

The Encyclopedia of Religion defines religion this way:

In summary, it may be said that almost every known culture involves the religious in the above sense of a depth dimension in cultural experiences at all levels—a push, whether ill-defined or conscious, toward some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life. When more or less distinct patterns of behaviour are built around this depth dimension in a culture, this structure constitutes religion in its historically recognizable form. Religion is the organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience—varied in form, completeness, and clarity in accordance with the environing culture.^[7]

Other encyclopedic definitions include: «A general term used … to designate all concepts concerning the belief in god(s) and goddess(es) as well as other spiritual beings or transcendental ultimate concerns» (Penguin Dictionary of Religions (1997)) and «human beings’ relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine, or worthy of especial reverence.»^[8]

All of this being said, some scholars call the utility of the term «religion» into question, as it creates (or reifies) a distinction between the secular and sacred elements of human existence that may bear little relation to the lived experience of believers. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues, «[r]eligion [as a discrete category] is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.»^[2] Such critiques, and the porous, multivalent understanding of religion that they engender, should be taken into account throughout the following discussion.

Usage

In the earliest Latin accounts, the term «religion» was used exclusively to describe proper religious praxis — a sense of the term that was inherited by early Christian writers. Jonathan Z. Smith provides an excellent overview of this restrictive usage:

In both Roman and early Christian Latin usage, the noun forms religio/religiones and, most especially, the adjectival religiosus and the adverbial religiose were cultic terms referring primarily to the careful performance of ritual obligations. This sense survives in the English adverbial construction «religiously» designating a conscientious repetitive action…. The only distinctly Christian usage was the fifth-century extension of this cultic sense to the totality of an individual’s life in monasticism: «religion,» a life bound by monastic vows; «religious,» a monk; «to enter religion,» to join a monastery. It is this technical vocabulary that is first extended to non-Christian examples in the literature of exploration, particularly in the descriptions of the complex civilizations of Mesoamerica.»^[9]

In keeping with the term’s Latin origins, religious believers have characterized other belief systems as immoral forms of superstition. Likewise, some atheists, agnostics, deists, and skeptics regard all religious belief as superstition, as in Edmund Burke famous quip that «superstition is the religion of feeble minds.» Religious practices are most likely to be labeled «superstitious» by outsiders when they include belief in extraordinary events (miracles), an afterlife, supernatural interventions, apparitions or the efficacy of prayer, charms, incantations, the meaningfulness of omens, and prognostications. Greek and Roman pagans, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. The Romans regarded such fear of the gods (deisidaimonia) as superstitious. Early Christianity was outlawed as a superstitio Iudaica, a «Jewish superstition,» by Domitianin the 80s C.E., and by 425 C.E. Theodosius II outlawed Roman «pagan» traditions as superstitious.

The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states superstition «in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion.»^[10] The Catechism clearly dispels commonly held preconceptions or misunderstandings about Catholic doctrine relating to superstitious practices:

Superstition is a deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand is to fall into superstition.^[11]

History

Development of religion

There are a number of models regarding the ways in which religions come into being and develop. Broadly speaking, these models fall into three categories (as discussed below):

• Models which see religions as social constructions;
• Models which see religions as progressing toward higher, objective truth;
• Models which see a particular religion as absolutely true.

However, these models are not mutually exclusive, as multiple elements may be seen to apply simultaneously, or different models may be seen as applying more fittingly to different religions.

Pre-modern Religious Thought

In pre-modern (pre-urban) societies, religion is one defining factor of ethnicity, along with language, regional customs, national costume, etc. As Xenophanes famously comments:

Men make gods in their own image; those of the Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair. Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.^[12]

Ethnic religions may include officially sanctioned and organized civil religions with an organized clergy, but they are characterized in that adherents generally are defined by their ethnicity, and conversion essentially equates to cultural assimilation to the people in question. The notion of gentiles («nations») in Judaism reflect this state of affairs, the implicit assumption that each nation will have its own religion. Historical examples include Germanic polytheism, Celtic polytheism, Slavic polytheism and pre-Hellenistic Greek religion, as well as Hinduism and Chinese folk religion.

The «Axial Age»

Karl Jaspers, a prominent figure in the academic study of religion, posited a «quantum leap» in religious thought that occurred simultaneously on various parts of the planet in the six hundred year span between 800 and 200 B.C.E. This axial age, which he describes in his Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), was host to a number of key religious figures (such as Plato, Heraclitus, Laozi, Mencius, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Siddhartha Gautama, Mahavira, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the writers of the Upanishads), each of whom immeasurably extended the humanistic and metaphysical bases of their respective traditions. Jaspers saw in these developments in religion and philosophy a striking parallel without any obvious direct transmission of ideas from one region to the other, having found no recorded proof of any extensive inter-communication between Ancient Greece, the Middle East, India and China. This historical periodization has been adopted the majority of scholars and academics, and has become a prominent point of discussion in the history of religion.

Some of the more notable concepts to emerge in the Axial Age included monism, monotheism, the Platonic idealism of Hellenistic philosophy, the notion of atman in Vedanta, the notion of Dao in Daoism, and the so-called Golden Rule, which emerged independently in the writings of virtually all thinkers of the period.

Middle Ages

The present-day world religions established themselves throughout Eurasia during the Middle Ages through various world-expanding processes, including the «Christianization» of the West, the transmission of Buddhism to East Asia along the Silk Road, the decline of Indian Buddhism, the rise of Hinduism in India, and the spread of Islam throughout the Near East and much of Central Asia. In the High Middle Ages, Islam was in conflict with Christianity during the Crusades and with Hinduism in the Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent. In each of these cases, religion was generally transmitted as a subcomponent of an overarching ruling ideology, as exemplified in the various tales of forced conversions and religious persecution from the period.

In marked contrast to this deeply entrenched version of religious teachings, many medieval religious movements also emphasized the mystical notion of direct, unmediated contact with the Divine. Some of these groups include the Cathars, various Christian mystic saints (e.g., Hildegard of Bingen), Jewish Kabbala, the Bhakti movement in India, Sufism in Islam, and Zen Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism in the Far East.

Modern period

European colonization during the 15th to 19th centuries resulted in the spread of Christianity to Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Australia, the Philippines, and the Far East. This expansion brought Christianity into direct contact (and often contention) with the world’s other leading belief system, including Hinduism in India, Islam in the Middle East, and Confucianism and Daoism in China. This of course led to considerable regional repercussions, as existing religio-cultural traditions struggled to adopt their worldviews to the presence of these interlopers. Some examples of these responses include the Boxer Rebellion in China, the First War of Indian Independence, and the development of the Ghost Dance religion among indigenous North Americans — each of which, to a greater or lesser extent, was informed by both religious and political tensions.

At the same time, the 18th century saw the rise of a rationalist/secularist trend in Europe, which rose to prominence due to the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. During this period, the growing Continental disenfranchisement with Christianity led to an increased interest in the philosophical/religious traditions of China and India, with Buddhism, Upanishadic Hinduism, and Confucianism coming to play an influential role in the intellectual discourse of the day.

In the twentieth century, the role of religion in public life became an increasingly contentious issue. The Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and China were explicitly anti-religious, with Western Europe and America (at least among intellectual elites) becoming increasing secularized. At the same time, Christianity and Islam continued to spread at ever-increasing rates throughout the developing world. While many of these modern religious movements have stressed compassion and social justice, other fundamentalist strands (which have developed in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) have sought to use religious teachings to establish ideological world-views and forward conservative political agendas. Over and above these developments, a great variety of cults and new religious movements originated in the 20th century, many proposing syncretism of elements of established religions.

Demographics

Religious traditions fall into super-groups in comparative religion, arranged by historical origin and mutual influence. In this framework, the term «Abrahamic» describes those which originated in the Middle East, «Indian» depicts those that emerged in India, and «Far Eastern» refers to those that arose in East Asia. Another group with supra-regional influence are African diasporic religions, which have their origins in Central and West Africa.

• Abrahamic religions are by far the largest group, and these consist primarily of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (sometimes Bahá’í is also included). They are named for the patriarch Abraham, and are unified by their strict monotheism. Today, slightly more than fifty percent of the world’s population are followers of Abrahamic religions and they are spread widely around the world (with the exception of South-East Asia).
• Indian religions originated in Greater India and tend to share a number of key concepts, such as dharma and karma. They are most influential across the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, South East Asia, as well as in isolated parts of Russia. The main Indian religions are Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.
• Far Eastern religions consist of several East Asian religions which make use of the concept of Tao/Dao (in Chinese) or Do (in Japanese or Korean). They include Daoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Chondogyo, and Caodaism, as well as Far Eastern Buddhism (which represents an overlap between the «Far Eastern» and «Indian» groups).
• Iranic religions include Zoroastrianism, Yazdanism and historical traditions of Gnosticism (Mandaeanism, Manichaeism). Though distinct from the Abrahamic traditions, Iranian religious ideas have extensively influenced the outlook and spiritual practice of the other Middle Eastern faiths (as evidenced in Christian Gnosticism and Sufism), as well as in recent movements such as Bábísm and the Bahá’í Faith.
• African diasporic religions practiced in the Americas, imported as a result of the Atlantic slave trade of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, based upon the traditional animist religions of Central and West Africa.
• Indigenous tribal religions, formerly found on every continent, but now marginalized by the major organized faiths. Despite this, they often persist as undercurrents of folk religion. This category includes African traditional religions, Asian Shamanism, Native American religions, Austronesian and Australian Aboriginal traditions and arguably Chinese folk religion (overlaps with Far Eastern religions).
• New religious movements, a heterogeneous group of religious faiths emerging since the nineteenth century, often syncretizing, re-interpreting or reviving aspects of older traditions (Bahá’í, Hindu revivalism, Ayyavazhi, Pentecostalism, polytheistic reconstructionism), some inspired by science-fiction (UFO religions, Scientology).

Religious Belief and Related Forms of Thought

Religious belief usually relates to the existence, nature and worship of a deity or deities, and to faith in divine involvement in the universe and human life. Alternately, it may also relate to values and practices transmitted by a spiritual leader. Unlike other belief systems, which may be passed on orally, religious belief tends to be codified in literate societies (whereas religion in non-literate societies is still largely passed on orally).^[13]

Religion, metaphysics, and cosmology

Religion and philosophy meet in several areas, notably in the study of metaphysics and cosmology. In particular, a distinct set of religious beliefs will often entail a specific metaphysics and cosmology. That is, a religion will generally have answers to metaphysical and cosmological questions about the nature of being, of the universe, humanity, and the divine.

Given the generalized discontents with modernity, consumerism, over-consumption, violence and anomie, many people in the so-called industrial or post-industrial West rely on a number of distinctive religious world views (Zeitgeist). This, in turn, has given rise to increased religious pluralism, as well as to what are commonly known in the academic literature as new religious movements, which are gaining adherents around the globe. As suggested above, religious systems (both traditional and modern) are increasing in influence due to the perceived failure of modern/secular ideologies.

Spirituality

Some individuals draw a strong distinction between religion and spirituality. They may see spirituality as a belief in ideas of religious significance (such as God, the Soul, or Heaven), but not feel bound to the bureaucratic structure and creeds of a particular organized religion. In this context, the term spirituality is often consciously chosen in opposition to the designation «religion,» perhaps reflecting a disillusionment with organized religion and a movement towards more «modern» (i.e., more tolerant and more intuitive) forms of religious practice. These individuals may reject organized religion because of historical acts by religious organizations, such as Christian Crusades, the Islamic Jihad, the Spanish Inquisition, and the marginalisation and persecution of various minorities. This being said, many adherents of the «World Religions» do not demarcate between religion and spirituality, as they interpret their tradition as providing access to the spiritual realm.

Mysticism and esotericism

Mysticism, in contrast with philosophy, denies that logic is the most important method of gaining enlightenment. Rather, it is to be attained through non-ordinary states of consciousness, which are, in turn, achieved through psychological and physical processes (such as repetitive prayer, meditation, mantra recitation, yoga, stringent fasting, whirling (as in the case of the Sufi dervishes), and/or the use of psychoactive drugs).

From a religious standpoint, mysticism it thought of as religious practice meant enable communion with (or conscious awareness of) Ultimate Reality, the Divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct, personal experience (intuition or insight) rather than rational ideation. Mystics speak of the existence of realities beyond sensory perception or intellectual apprehension that are directly accessible through personal experience, arguing that these experiences are genuine and important sources of knowledge. Many religious traditions have mystical elements, though these strands are often marginalized due to their counter-hegemonic nature (in denying the necessity of mediation between the individual and the divine).

In a related manner, esotericism claims to be more sophisticated than religion, to rely on intellectual understanding rather than faith, and to improve on philosophy in its emphasis on techniques of psycho-spiritual transformation (esoteric cosmology). Esotericism refers to «hidden» knowledge available only to the advanced, privileged, or initiated, as opposed to exoteric knowledge, which is public. It applies especially to spiritual practices. The mystery religions of ancient Greece, the Gnostic systems of the Middle East, and the Hindu path of jnana marga are examples of esoteric religiosity. Some mystical doctrines, such as the Jewish Kabbala, are also esoteric.

Myth

The word myth has several meanings.

1. A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon;
2. A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
3. A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being. ^[14]

Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called «myths» in the anthropology of religion. The term «myth» can be used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. By defining another person’s religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than one’s own religious stories and beliefs. Joseph Campbell remarked,

«Mythology is often thought of as other people’s religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology.»^[15]

In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the group whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the death and resurrection of Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin and is also ostensibly a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the symbolism of the death of an old «life» and the start of a new «life» is what is most significant.

Cosmology

Humans have many different methods which attempt to answer fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and our place in it (cosmology). Religion is only one of the methods for trying to answer one or more of these questions. Other methods include science, philosophy, metaphysics, astrology, esotericism, mysticism, and forms of shamanism.

For instance, consider the the sacred consumption of ayahuasca (a psychoactive vegetable extract) among Peruvian Amazonia’s Urarina. The Urarina have an elaborate animistic cosmological system that informs their mythology, religious orientation and daily existence.^[16]

Religion and science

Religious knowledge, according to religious practitioners, may be gained from religious leaders, sacred texts, and/or personal revelation. Some religions view such knowledge as unlimited in scope and suitable to answer any question; others see religious knowledge as playing a more restricted role, often as a complement to knowledge gained through physical observation. Some religious people maintain that religious knowledge obtained in this way is absolute and infallible, usually due to a fundamentalist certainty in the inerrancy of their scriptures.

In contrast to the intuitive process of knowing advocated by many religious groups, the scientific method states that knowledge must be gained by using empirical facts to test hypotheses and develop theories. It develops theories of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is probabilistic and subject to later improvement or revision in the face of better evidence. Scientific theories that have an overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as facts (such as the theories of gravity or evolution). The logically-positivistic approach only answers cosmological questions about the physical universe, often suggesting that other types of knowing are fallacious.

This being said, many scientists held strong religious beliefs and worked to harmonize science and religion. Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the Sun, and credited God with the design. In the concluding «General Scholium» to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: «This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.»^[17] Likewise, adherents of many other religious traditions have considered scientific exploration to be utterly commensurate with religious life, suggesting that they are simply deepening the existing understanding of the Divine through exploring His(/Her/Its) works. It was such a perspective that allowed the flourishing of science in the Muslim world during the Dark Ages, with scientists such as al-Khwārizmī and Ibn Sina preserving and building upon the mathematical, medical, astronomical, and biological knowledge of the ancient Greeks. In a similar manner, the Bahá’í Faith asserts the harmony of science and religion as a central tenet of its belief system.^[18] The principle states that that truth is one, and therefore true science and true religion must be in harmony, thus rejecting the view that science and religion are in conflict.^[18] Some Hindu and Daoist scientists propound similar beliefs, often using terms and concepts from classical religious texts to explore the scientific realities of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics.^[19]

Nevertheless, conflict arose between religious organizations and individuals who propagated scientific theories which were deemed unacceptable by these organizations. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has in the past reserved to itself the right to decide which scientific theories were acceptable and which were unacceptable.^[20] In the seventeenth century, Galileo was tried and forced to recant the heliocentric theory based on the medieval church’s stance that the Greek Hellenistic system of astronomy was the correct one.^[21][22] This being said, many modern theorists are suggesting that it is reductive and misleading to view the relationship between science and religion as essentially antagonistic, especially when approaching historical sources. The historian of early modern Europe Lewis Spitz says: «To set up a ‘warfare of science and theology’ is an exercise in futility and a reflection of a nineteenth century materialism now happily transcended.»^[23] Colin A. Russell suggests that «The conflict thesis, at least in its simple form, is now widely perceived as a wholly inadequate intellectual framework within which to construct a sensible and realistic historiography of Western science.» ^[24] Gary Ferngren, in his historical volume Science & Religion, states:

While some historians had always regarded the [conflict] thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late twentieth century it underwent a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule.^[25]

Similarly multivalent attitudes can be found within the range of the world’s religious traditions.

The philosophical approach known as pragmatism, as propounded by the American philosopher William James, has been used to reconcile scientific with religious knowledge. Pragmatism, simplistically, holds that the truth of a set of beliefs can be indicated by its usefulness in helping people cope with a particular context of life. Thus, the fact that scientific beliefs are useful in predicting observations in the physical world can indicate a certain truth for scientific theories; the fact that religious beliefs can be useful in helping people cope with difficult emotions or moral decisions can indicate a certain truth for those beliefs. William James’ conception was that the pragmatic utility of propositions (which is defined by their compatibility with lived experience) is the hallmark of truth, such that “the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief” and “the true … is only the expedient in our way of thinking.”^[26]

Approaches to the Study of Religion

Methods of studying religion objectively (in a scientific and religiously neutral fashion)

There are a variety of methods employed to study religion that seek to be phenomenologically neutral. One’s interpretation of these methods depends on one’s approach to the relationship between religion and science, as discussed above.

• Historical, archeological, philological and literary approaches to religion include attempts to discover early spiritual intuitions through the study of sacred writings and archeological evidence. For example, Max Müller in 1879 launched a project to translate the earliest sacred texts of Hinduism into English in the Sacred Books of the East. Müller’s intent was to translate for the first time the «bright» as well as the «dark sides» of non-Christian religions into English.^[27] These approaches tend to approach religions as historically- and culturally-bounded entities, causing them to occasionally reify traditions as more cohesive entities than is plausible.

• Anthropological approaches include attempts to lay out the principles of native tribes that have had little contact with modern technology as in John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. The term «religion» is problematic for anthropologists, and their approaches to the subject are quite varied. Some take the view that religion, particularly in less technically complex cultures, is a form of proto-science—a primitive attempt to explain and predict phenomena in the natural world, similar to modern science but less advanced. However, most modern anthropologists reject this view as antiquated, ethnically and intellectually chauvinistic, and unsupported by cross-cultural evidence. Science has very specific methods and aims, while the term «religion» encompasses a huge spectrum of practices, goals, and social functions. In addition to explaining the world (natural or otherwise), religions may also provide mechanisms for maintaining social and psychological well-being, and the foundations of moral/ethical, economic, and political reasoning.

• Sociological approaches include attempts to explain the relationship between religious thought/practice and social realities (most typically, the development of morality and law). An early example of this approach can be seen in Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1842), which hypothesizes that that a society’s religious mindset goes through the following stages of evolution: 1) obeying supernatural beings, 2) manipulating abstract unseen forces, and 3) exploring more or less scientifically the social laws and practical governmental structures that work in practice. Within a sociological approach, religion is but the earliest primitive stage of discovering what is socially expedient and morally right in a civilized society. It is the duty of intelligent men and women everywhere to take responsibility for shaping the society without appealing to a (potentially non-existent) Divinity and to discover empirically what moral concepts actually work in practice. Comte wrote, in translation, «It can not be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon Opinions. The great political and moral crisis that societies are now undergoing is shown by a rigid analysis to arise out of intellectual anarchy.» The intellectual anarchy includes the warring oppositions among the world’s religions. In a later sociological approach, Rodney Stark has met with considerable success in his attempt to analyze the social forces that have caused religions to expand over time and the features of these religions that have been most successful in weathering changes in social circumstance. For example, Stark hypothesizes that, before Christianity became established as the state religion of Constantinople, it grew rapidly because it provided a practical framework within which non-family members would provide help to other people in the community in a barter system of mutual assistance. Similarly, evolutionary psychology approaches consider the survival advantages that religion might have given to a community of hunter-gatherers, such as unifying them within a coherent social group.

• Philosophical approaches include attempts to derive rational classifications of the views of the world that religions preach, as in Immanuel Kant’s 1788 Critique of Practical Reason. Within a philosophical approach, the reason for a religious belief should be more important than the emotional attachment to the belief. One subset of this approach is the use of epistemological and ontological inquiries, which aim to explore religion by addressing the very nature of how one comes accept any belief or assumption as true on its own terms while bringing especial attention to such issues as the nature of reality and the «knowability» of various types of truth.

• Psychological approaches. The psychology of religion involves the gathering and classification of various types of data and the building of the explanations of the psychological processes underlying the religious experiences and beliefs. It includes a wide variety of researches (psychoanalytical and others): Sigmund Freud (Oedipus Complex, Illusion), Carl Jung (Universal archetypes), Erich Fromm (Desire, Need for stable frame), William James (Personal religious experience, Pragmatism), Alfred Adler (Feeling of inferiority, Perfection), Ludwig Feuerbach (Imagination, Wishes, Fear of Death), Gordon Allport (Mature religion and Immature religion), Erik Erikson (Influence on personality development), Rudolf Otto (Non-rational experience), James Leuba (Mystical experiences and drugs).

• Neuroscientific approaches seek to explore the apparent similarities among religious views dominant in diverse cultures that have had little or no contact, why religion is found in almost every human group, and why humans accept counterintuitive statements in the name of religion. In neuroscience, work by scientists such as Ramachandran and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, suggests evidence of brain circuitry in the temporal lobe associated with intense religious experiences.

• Cognitive psychological approaches take a completely different approach to explaining religion. Foremost among them is Pascal Boyer, whose book, Religion Explained, lays out the basics of his theory, and attempts to refute several previous and more direct explanations for the phenomenon of religion. Religion is taken in its broadest sense (from holy mountains over ancestral spirits to monotheistic deities). An explanation is offered for human religious behavior without making a presumption, to the positive or the negative, about the actual subject matter of the religious beliefs. Essentially, the reasoning goes that religion is a side effect to the normal functioning of certain subconscious intuitive mental faculties which normally apply to physics (enabling prediction of the arc a football will take only seconds after its release, for example), and social networks (to keep track of other people’s identity, history, loyalty, etc.), and a variety of others. For instance, the same mechanism that serves to link—without explaining—an event (e.g. rustling of tall grass) with a cause (the possible presence of a predator) will help to form or sustain a belief that two random events are linked, or that an unexplained event is linked to supernatural causes. The reasoning would imply that there is no direct causal link between the subject matter of a belief (e.g. whether the ancestors watch over us) and the fact that there is such a belief.

For a discussion of the struggle to attain objectivity in the scientific study of religion, see Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, who argues that some studies performed pursuant to these methods make claims beyond the realm of observable and verifiable phenomena, and are therefore neither scientific nor religiously neutral.

Criticism

In the modern age, some intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to criticize the continued influence of religion, which they often dismiss as superstition. Most of these western critics focus on the Abrahamic religions—particularly Christianity and Islam—with titles such as Why I am not a Christian, The God Delusion, and The End of Faith representing some recent popular published books. These scholars consider all religious faith to be essentially irrational, often suggesting that the continued acceptance of these beliefs constitutes a danger to the survival of the human race.^[28] More explicitly, many of these critics claim dogmatic religions are typically morally deficient, elevating to moral status ancient, arbitrary, and ill-informed rules that may have been designed for reasons of hygiene, politics, or other reasons in a bygone era. Nobel Peace Laureate, Muslim, and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi has spoken out against undemocratic Islamic countries justifying «oppressive acts» in the name of Islam. Speaking at the Earth Dialogues 2006 conference in Brisbane, Ebadi said her native Iran as well as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Yemen, «among others» were guilty of human rights violations. «In these countries, Islamic rulers want to solve twenty-first century issues with laws belonging to 14 centuries ago,» she said. However, it should be noted that not all the criticisms apply to all religions: criticism regarding the existence of god(s), for example, has very little relevance to some forms of Buddhism.

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. John K. Ryan translator. Image, 1960. ISBN 0385029551.
• Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0465006960
• Brown, Delwin, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner (eds.). Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism. (Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion) American Academy of Religion Book, 2001. ISBN 978-0195144673.
• Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. Broadway, 1988. ISBN 0385247745.
• Campbell, Joseph. Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. London: New World Library. ISBN 1577312023.
• Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Boston: Shambhala, 2000. ISBN 1570625190.
• Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Bobbs-Merrill, 1960. ISBN 0672601915.
• Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. Our Oriental Heritage. MJF Books, 1997. ISBN 1567310125.
• Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. Caesar and Christ. MJF Books. 1994. ISBN 1567310141
• Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Faith. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. ISBN 0671012002.
• Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976.
• Esslemont, J.E. Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era, 5th ed., Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1980. ISBN 0877431604.
• Ferngren, Gary (ed.). Science & Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN 0801870380.
• Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1977. ISBN 0465097197
• Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1989.
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. University of Chicago Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0226300634
• Gonick, Larry. The Cartoon History of the Universe. Doubleday, vol. 1 (1978) ISBN 0385265204; vol. II (1994) ISBN 038520935; W. W. Norton, vol. III (2002) ISBN 0393051846.
• Haisch, Bernard. The God Theory: Universes, Zero-point Fields, and What’s Behind It All. Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006. ISBN 1578633745.
• Korotayev, Andrey. World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. ISBN 0773463100.
• Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching, Victor H. Mair, translator. Bantam, 1998.
• Lindbeck, George A. Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1984. ISBN 0664246184.
• Lubbock, Sir John. The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. London: 1871 (second ed.)
• Marx, Karl. «Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,» Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. 1844.
• Murdin, Paul, and Lesley Murdin. Supernovae. Cambridge University Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0521300384
• Paṇḍā, Nr̥siṃhacaraṇa. Maya in Physics. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991. ISBN 8120806980.
• Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Crossway Books, 2008. ISBN 1433502208.
• Saler, Benson. Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Berghahn Books, 1990. ISBN 1571812199.
• Smith, Jonathan Z., «Religion, Religions, Religious,» 269-284. Critical Terms for Religious Studies. edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0226791564.
• Spitz, Lewis. The Protestant Reformation 1517-1559. (The Rise of modern Europe) Harper Torchbooks, 1987. ISBN 0061320692.
• Wallace, Anthony F. C. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House, 1966.

Scripture

• The Holy Bible, King James Version; New American Library, 1974.
• The Koran. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN 0140445587.
• The Origin of Live & Death, African Creation Myths; Heinemann, 1966.
• Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia. Penguin, 1971.

External links

All links retrieved December 7, 2022.

• A Scientific Definition of Religion by James W. Dow, anpere.net.
• A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right — Marx’s original reference to religion as the opium of the people.