Religion is a set of culturally specific beliefs, practices, rituals and ethics. It is a way of dealing with fundamental concerns such as life after death, the nature of the universe and the meaning of one’s existence. Religions also have sacred histories, narratives and mythologies that seek to explain the origins of life, the world and other phenomena. Religious beliefs may vary widely, but some common aspects include the existence of a divine creator or supreme being, a belief in heaven and hell, forgiveness of wrongdoing and reward after death, and a sense of belonging to a community or tribe.
Religions provide social support and help people deal with problems, both emotional and practical. They provide a structure for group identity and integration, and they foster morality by teaching what is right and wrong. They also function as a source of power, control and authority, and they may be used to impose sanctions and punishment. Some religions are violent, and there have been a number of examples of religiously motivated atrocities.
In the modern era, it is common to define religion as a belief in a god or gods and adherence to religious laws or teachings. However, Edward Burnett Tylor argued that this definition is too narrow and that the concept of religion should be broader. In his view, it should encompass all societal developments that have some form of belief in spiritual beings.
The concept of religion has changed significantly over the years, and it is now used as a taxon for sets of practices rather than to denote a specific tradition. Some examples of the practices that are said to belong to this category are agnosticism, atheism, humanism, neopaganism, pagan religion, polytheism, reincarnation, shamanism and transcendentalism.
It is also now common to consider the various religious traditions as a family of religions, and to study them with anthropological, phenomenological, psychological or sociological techniques. The rise of these academic approaches was spurred by the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, when important thinkers reworked the intellectual understanding of religion and broke away from the assumption that it would fade as scientific knowledge increased.
The term’religion’ is often used to refer to the practice of worshiping a deity or deities, but it can also be used to describe any other activity or behaviour that is associated with a religion, including rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of saints or other religious figures), sacrifices, festivals and feasts, trances, initiations and matrimonial and funeral services. Some of these activities may also be considered art or music. The term is also commonly used in a figurative sense to indicate someone’s state of mind, or’religiousness’. The word comes from the Latin religio, which roughly means scrupulousness, piety or devotedness. The article is written by Robert Wutchman. It is part of the Wikibooks Philosophy of Religion Series. See the table of contents on the left for more articles in this series. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.