Religions offer people a means to explore the nature of human possibility. They do this by creating a context within which sanction and reward, approval and disapproval, inspiration and ideation are held in common. The result of this exploration is the religious worldview, the way of being that organizes a person’s life. This worldview also provides a framework within which the limitations of his or her body are interpreted. This is a kind of somatic exploration that allows people to be freed from many anxieties and uncertainties.
The social genus of religion is a concept that has been a target of study for several decades. In the past, scholars have tended to define religion functionally as whatever beliefs and practices generate social cohesion or provide orientation in life. This approach is sometimes called monothetic, because it assumes that any given example accurately describes its category and that the category itself names a universal feature of human nature.
Other scholars, however, have used the term to describe a class of phenomena characterized by a particular pattern. This method of analysis, referred to as polythetic, focuses on the properties that characterize the category in question and the relationships among these characteristics. Polythetic approaches are akin to the scientific method, in which a new phenomenon is classified according to its characteristics. Then, patterns are discovered and connections are made among these features to construct explanatory theories.
The sociobiological approach suggests that religions are early and, for millennia, successful protective systems tied to the potentialities of the brain and body and the necessity for survival. The key to the protection of such systems is the monitoring, coding, protecting, and transmitting of information about what is most important for life. The information to be protected ranges from the most personal to the most universal of human goals. It includes codes of recognition and expectations of behavior which create social cohesion, enabling society to function as it does. It also includes moral behavior, which is the basis for a more just society.
In addition, religious systems protect and transmit the means to attain the most important of all human goals. These may be proximate, such as the pursuit of a more wise, fruitful, charitable, or successful way of living, and they may have to do with the final condition of this or any other human person, or even of the universe itself. Such goals make the project of life a little less daunting, because they allow us to recognize the limitations in advance and to develop ways of dealing with them.
It is also worth noting that the study of religions, which was born in a specific historical and cultural milieu, has largely rejected the pretense of evaluating different religions normatively. This task is legitimate for philosophy and theology, but it is not for history, which attempts to study these systems as they are, rather than in relation to each other. This is a difficult task and is often frustrated by the resistance of religious believers to the efforts of scientists and philosophers and skeptics to disprove their claims and ideas.