Religion is a system of beliefs and values, rituals, symbols and sacred spaces that form the basis for an individual or group’s worldview. It includes attitudes and feelings about the divine, supernatural, or transcendent, as well as a system of ethics and morality that guides one’s behavior and life choices. Religion is a central part of the culture of every society and can be a powerful motivating force. It is also often a source of controversy and conflict.
The term “religion” was derived from the Latin nobis religio, meaning, literally, “our way of worship”. It is often defined as an organized and integrated set of beliefs, behaviours and norms centred on basic social needs and values. It can be found in every cultural system and consists of ceremonies, traditions, practices, beliefs and ethics. Religions also share some common elements such as a recognition that there is a universe beyond this, an acknowledgment that death is a natural process and that people die, and the concept of an afterlife.
In modern times, scholars and writers use the word religion in a variety of ways. For some, the phrase is used to refer to specific religions such as Christianity and Islam. Others use it to describe a particular culture or cultural phenomenon, and still others use it in a more broad sense to define any system of belief that is centered on moral values and the afterlife. The vast range of practices that can be classified as religions makes it difficult to define, but most scholars agree that there are a number of important characteristics. The most significant are:
For some, definitions that narrow the scope of religion to include only those beliefs that focus on a supernatural being or cosmological order do not adequately reflect the full complexity of religious phenomena. Other scholars, such as Emile Durkheim, take a different approach and define religion as whatever system of practices unites a group of people into a single moral community (whether or not those practices involve belief in unusual realities).
Many social scientists argue that it is too simplistic to define religion in terms of its particular beliefs. They argue that such definitions are based on an assumption that religious practice and beliefs do not belong to a larger category of cultural phenomena. They use tools of sociology to demonstrate that, in fact, religion is a universally human phenomenon.
There are also some critics who have argued that the concept of religion is not real at all. They point to the fact that the word religion was invented and have a very European meaning and that its modern semantic expansion went hand in hand with Western colonialism. These critics call for an examination of the assumptions baked into the concept of religion and for a rejection of substantive definitions of religion. Others have gone further and criticized the notion that it is possible to even speak of an artificial idea such as the concept of religion at all.