Religion is a range of social system-, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, , , religious text, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spirituality elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.
The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, , and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, Religious symbol, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include , , commemoration or veneration (of deities or ), , festivals, , , , matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, Religious music, Religious art, Religious dance, or public service.
There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, 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, meaning that the vast majority of remaining religions 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. Many are also organized religions, most definitively including the Abrahamic religions Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, while others are arguably less so, in particular , indigenous religions, and some Eastern religions. A portion of the world's population are members of new religious movements.Eileen Barker, 1999, "New Religious Movements: their incidence and significance", New Religious Movements: challenge and response, Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell editors, Routledge Scholars have indicated that Desecularization due to religious countries having generally higher birth rates.
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.
Roman general Julius Caesar used religiō to mean "obligation of an oath" when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors.
The concept of "ancient religion" stems from modern interpretations of a range of practices that conform to a modern concept of religion, influenced by early modern and 19th century Christian discourse.
The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,The Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as religion, 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.Neil McMullin. Buddhism and the State in Sixteenth-Century Japan. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1984.
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.
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, pietas (which Cicero further derived to mean diligence).Max Müller, Natural Religion, p. 33, 1889 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.
An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the essence of religion. 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). The MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions states:
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as a:
Alluding perhaps to Tylor's "deeper motive", Geertz remarked that:
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:
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:
According to the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions, there is an experiential aspect to religion which can be found in almost every culture:
Anthropologists Lyle Steadman and Craig T. Palmer emphasized the communication of supernatural beliefs, defining religion as:
His contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."Max Müller. "Lectures on the origin and growth of religion."
Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion in 1871 as "the belief in spiritual beings".Tylor, E.B. (1871) Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Vol. 1. London: John Murray; (p. 424). 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." By the term divine James meant "any object that is god like, whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.
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". 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 are not, however, limited to gods or spirits.That is how, according to Durkheim, Buddhism is a religion. "In default of gods, Buddhism admits the existence of sacred things, namely, the four noble truths and the practices derived from them" 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." 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.
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".Frederick Ferré, F. (1967) Basic modern philosophy of religion. Scribner, (p. 82). Similarly, for the theologian Paul Tillich, faith is "the state of being ultimately concerned", which "is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man's spiritual life."Tillich, P. (1959) Theology of Culture. Oxford University Press; (p. 8).
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.Pecorino, P.A. (2001) Philosophy of Religion. Online Textbook . Philip A. Pecorino.
Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Ancient Rome, and Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or 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."Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor. Ed. Eugene Kennedy. New World Library .
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 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 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.
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 Psychoanalysis approach of Sigmund Freud; and further Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz.
Michael Stausberg gives an overview of contemporary theories of religion, including cognitive and biological approaches.
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."
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 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, , the family, government, and politics hierarchies.
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."
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. Schizophrenic episodes are also experienced by people who do not have belief in gods.
Religious content is also common in temporal lobe epilepsy, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Atheistic content is also found to be common with temporal lobe epilepsy.
In the field of comparative religion, a common geographical classification 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.
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.Brian Kemble Pennington Was Hinduism Invented? New York: Oxford University Press US, 2005. Russell T. McCutcheon. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.Nicholas Lash. The beginning and the end of 'religion'. Cambridge University Press, 1996. 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).Joseph Bulbulia. "Are There Any Religions? An Evolutionary Explanation." Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 17.2 (2005), pp. 71–100
Christianity | 2.3 | 31% | Christianity by country |
Islam | 1.8 | 24% | Islam by country |
Hinduism | 1.1 | 15% | 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 Irreligion, 13% as convinced Atheism, and also a 9% decrease in identification as religious when compared to the 2005 average from 39 countries. A follow-up poll in 2015 found that 63% of the globe identified as religious, 22% as not religious, and 11% as convinced atheists. On average, women are more religious than men. 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. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers – p. 77, Christian Smith, Melina Lundquist Denton – 2005"Christ in Japanese Culture: Theological Themes" in Shusaku Endo's Literary Works, Emi Mase-Hasegawa – 2008 New poll reveals how churchgoers mix eastern new age beliefs retrieved 26 July 2013 Unaffiliated populations are projected to drop, even when taking disaffiliation rates into account, due to differences in birth rates.
Scholars have indicated that Desecularization due to religious countries having higher birth rates in general.
There are also smaller groups, including:
Other denominations of Islam include Nation of Islam, Ibadi, Sufism, Quranism, Mahdavia, Ahmadiyya and non-denominational Muslims. Wahhabism is the dominant Muslim Maddhab in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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.
Scholars classify the Druze faith as an independent Abrahamic religion because it developed its own unique doctrines and eventually separated from both Isma'ilism and Islam altogether. One of these doctrines includes the belief that Al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh was an Incarnation.Mandaeism, sometimes also known as Sabianism (after the mysterious Sabians mentioned in the Quran, a name historically claimed by several religious groups),
p. 5. is a Gnosticism, monotheistic and ethnic religion.
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.
Folk religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where they are widely practiced, e.g., in China.
There are also notable African diasporic religions practiced in the Americas, such as Santeria, Candomble, Haitian Vodun, Lucumi religion, Umbanda, and Macumba.
Zoroastrianism is based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster in the 6th century BCE. Zoroastrians worship the Creator deity 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,
Alevi, and Ahl-e Haqq. Sometimes these are labeled Yazdânism.
Studies have focused on secularization. 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.
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. 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),
In general, the scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by and thus only answers cosmological questions about the universe that can be observed and measured. It develops theory 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.
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. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action; it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts...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."
Religion and morality are not synonymous. While it is often assumed in Christian thought that morality is ultimately based in religion, it can also have a Secular morality.
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.
Sociologist and political economist Max Weber has argued that Protestant Christian countries are wealthier because of their Protestant work ethic.Max Weber, 1904 1920. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 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).
The authors of a subsequent study concluded that the influence of religion on health is largely beneficial, based on a review of related literature. According to academic James W. Jones, several studies have discovered "positive correlations between religious belief and practice and mental and physical health and longevity."
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.
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."
Superstition has been described as the non-rational establishment of cause and effect. 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.
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)
Recent interfaith initiatives include A Common Word, launched in 2007 and focused on bringing Muslim and Christian leaders together, the "C1 World Dialogue", the Common Ground initiative between Islam and Buddhism, and a United Nations sponsored "World Interfaith Harmony Week".
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.Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, Robert C. Kimball (ed), (Oxford University Press, 1959). p.42Ernst 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 kill it in the same manner that transplanting a plant from its natural soil to an alien soil would kill it.Eric J. Sharpe, "Religion and Cultures", An inaugural lecture delivered on 6 July 1977 by Eric J. Sharpe, Professor of Religious Studies in the University of Sydney. Accessed at Openjournals on 22 June 2018 However, there have been many attempts in the modern pluralistic situation to distinguish culture from religion.See Taslima Nasreen, "I Say, Three Cheers For Ayaan" , Outlook, The Magazine 28 August 2006. Also, Nemani Delaibatiki, "Religion and the Vanua" Fiji Sun 8 July 2017 in which the distinctive elements of culture against religion are taken from Domenic Marbaniang, "Difference Between Culture and Religion: A Proposal Requesting Response" , 12 October 2014. 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.Domenic Marbaniang, "The Gospel and Culture: Areas of Conflict, Consent, and Conversion", Journal of Contemporary Christian Vol. 6, No. 1 (Bangalore: CFCC, Aug 2014), pp. 7–17
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