Religion

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Religion is normally defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors & practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that broadly relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, together with spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what exactly constitutes a religion.

Different religions may or may non contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith, a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some breed of ultimacy and transcendence that will manage norms and power to direct or determining for the rest of life". Religious practices may put rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration of deities and/or saints, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Religions hit sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, and symbols and holy places, that intention mostly to administer a meaning to life. Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that may also try to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a quotation of religious beliefs.

There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide. approximately 84% of the world's population is affiliated with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or some take of folk religion. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists, and agnostics. While the religiously unaffiliated have grown globally, many of the religiously unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs.

The study of religion comprises a wide set of academic disciplines, including theology, philosophy of religion, comparative religion, and social scientific studies. Theories of religion offer various explanations for the origins and works of religion, including the ontological foundations of religious being and belief.

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.

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

An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations approximately ever defining the essence of religion. They observe that the way the concept today is used is a particularly advanced 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 very try 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. this is the 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 image in this tradition, even when downgraded culturally, is formative of the dichotomous Western view of religion. That is, the basic sorting of theism is essentially a distinction between a transcendent deity and all else, between the creator and his creation, between God and man.

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 structure of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivationsuniquely realistic."

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 toit.

The theologian Antoine Vergote took the term supernatural simply to intend 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.

Peter Mandaville and Paul James referenced 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.

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 supply norms and power to direct or determine 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.

Friedrich Schleiermacher in the gradual 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, usually translated as "the feeling of absolute dependence".

His contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."

Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion in 1871 as "the belief in spiritual beings". 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 so-called 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 version to whatever they may consider the divine". By the term divine James meant "any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the individual feels impelled towith solemnity and gravity.

The 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 things are not, however, limited to gods or spirits. On the contrary, a sacred thing can be "a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a bit 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". 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."

When religion is seen in terms of sacred, divine, intensive valuing, orconcern, then it is possible to understand why scientific findings and philosophical criticisms e.g., those presentation by Richard Dawkins do not necessarily disturb its adherents.