Religion is an ancient human phenomenon that encompasses a wide range of cultural beliefs, practices and traditions. Whether it be a belief in God, spirits or deities, angels or ghosts, reincarnation or salvation, rituals and rites of passage, moral codes and ethics, or social structures and institutions, religious systems are among the most widespread and ancient of all human cultural systems. It is also one of the most difficult concepts to define. There have been a variety of attempts to do so, ranging from the stipulative definitions offered by dictionary editors to polythetic approaches that attempt to sort a range of cultural types into categories on the basis of family resemblance.
The defining properties that most scholars have chosen to emphasize in their attempts to categorize religion are largely those of VALUE. Religions are a special class of social values because they have a particular intensity and scope, encompassing not only the highest and most fundamental values that are important to human beings but all the ways in which these values are manifested in human society.
For example, they are the source and inspiration of all art (especially painting and sculpture), music, dance, drama, poetry and the explorations of the cosmos that issued eventually as natural science. Religions also provide the context within which sanctions and rewards, approval and disapproval, and inspiration and ideation are held in common.
Moreover, they serve as the source and channel through which people can attain their proximate and ultimate goals, as designated by the religious systems themselves. For example, a religious system might help people to deal with skepticism by offering them a sense of security and a sense of order and continuity in the world that they inhabit, and provide them with means through which their mistakes and wrongdoing can be forgiven and their future hopes for happiness or perfection can be realized.
Religions also offer people maps of time and space, and they enable them to deal with the limits of their lives and to understand and accept these limitations. They tell stories about the past and give their followers a sense of what the future might hold, even when this prediction is wildly inaccurate. Religious systems also include many rituals that permit their believers to visit the past in order to relive or deal with it, and to visit the future in order to plan for it.
All of this is true, but it is equally true that the more one studies religion, the more it seems that there is no essential property that defines it. This is why the debate about what is and is not a religion has been so lively. As the importance of religion has waned in the Western world, so too has the confidence that it can answer our questions and provide us with solutions to the challenges that we face. But for the most part, the world’s religions continue to offer the same enduring values that they have always offered: love, peace and understanding of our place in the universe.