Religion is a large and complex set of beliefs, phenomena and practices that people in the world around them have found to be useful in coping with life’s problems. Some forms of religion involve belief in the existence of a supreme God or gods, or in the creation or control of the universe by such entities; others are concerned with ethical and moral teachings; and still others with ideas about reincarnation, ghosts and spirits, spiritual energy located in physical things, or the interpretation of dreams, among other issues.
All religious systems, like all cultural systems, provide ways of navigating life as project. They protect information about means to attain certain goals, proximate in this life (a wiser, more fruitful, more charitable, more successful way of living) or ultimate in the process of rebirth and the ultimate condition of human beings and of the cosmos. They organize this information in ways that evoke the word “religion” and convey it from person to person, and from generation to generation, through forms of social gathering and organizational expression such as a village assembly, synagogue, mosque, church, gurdwara, temple or kumbh.
Most historical approaches to the study of Religion have been monothetic, defining it as a body of practices, communities and institutions that claim transcendent status for themselves. However, the concept has tended to become more polythetic in recent times. For example, one sees a functional definition in Emile Durkheim’s idea of religion as whatever system of practices unite a number of people into a single moral community (whether or not the practices involve belief in unusual realities). More generally, the concept is used to treat religion as a taxon for sets of cultural formations whose membership can be determined by the presence of certain properties, rather than by some predefined set of beliefs about reality.
