Religion

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This article is about a general set of beliefs about existence. For other uses, see Religion
(disambiguation).
"Religious" redirects here. For a member of a Catholic religious institute, see Religious
(Catholicism).
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A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that
relatehumanity to an order of existence. Many religions have narratives, symbols,
andsacred histories that aim to explain the meaning of life, the origin of life, or the Universe.
From their beliefs about the cosmos and human nature, people may
derive morality, ethics,religious laws, or a preferred lifestyle.
[note 1]

Many religions may have organized behaviors, clergy, a definition of what constitutes
adherence or membership, holy places, and scriptures. The practice of a religion may
includerituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of a deity, gods,
or goddesses), sacrifices,festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial
services, meditation,prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human
culture. Religions may also contain mythology.
[1]

The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or set of duties; however, in
the words of mile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is "something
eminently social". A global 2012 poll reports 59% of the world's population as "religious" and
23% as not religious, including 13% who are atheists, with a 9% decrease in religious belief
from 2005. Another 2015 poll similarly found that 22% of the world population are not
religious, including 11% who were 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
forsyncretism.
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Contents
[hide]

1Etymology

2Definitions

3Theories
o

3.1Origins and development

3.2Social constructionism

3.3Comparative religion

4Types
o

4.1Categories

4.2Interfaith cooperation

5Religious groups
o

5.1Abrahamic

5.2Iranian

5.3Indian

5.4East Asian religions

5.5African traditional

5.6Indigenous and folk

5.7New religious movements

6Issues
o

6.1IQ and atheism in society

6.2Economics

6.3Health

6.4Morality and religion

6.5Violence

6.6Law

6.7Science

6.8Animal sacrifice

7Related forms of thought

o

7.1Superstition

7.2Myth

8Secularism and irreligion

o

8.1Criticism of religion

9See also

10References
o

10.1Citations

10.2Notes

11Bibliography

12Further reading

13External links

Etymology
Main article: Religio (word)
Religion (from O.Fr. religion "religious community", from L. religionem (nom. religio) "respect
for what is sacred, reverence for the gods", "obligation, the bond between man and the
gods" ) is derived from the Latin religi, the ultimate origins of which are obscure. One
possibility is an interpretation traced to Cicero, connecting lego "read", i.e. re (again)
+ lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars
such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligare "bind, connect",
probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or "to reconnect", which was made
prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius. The medieval usage
alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: "we
hear of the 'religion' of the Golden Fleece, of a knight 'of the religion of Avys'".
[10]

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In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an
individual virtue of worship, never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. The
modern concept of "religion" as an abstraction which entails distinct sets of beliefs or
doctrines is a recent invention in the English language since such usage began with texts
from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation
and more prevalent colonization or globalization in the age of exploration which involved
contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures with non-European languages. It
was in the 17th century that the concept of "religion" received its modern shape despite the
fact that ancient texts like the Bible, the Quran, and other ancient sacred texts did not have a
concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in
which these sacred texts were written. For example, the Greek word threskeia, which was
used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus and is found in texts like the New
Testament, is sometimes translated as "religion" today, however, the term was understood as
"worship" well into the medieval period. In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated
as "religion" in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed din as
"law". Even in the 1st century AD, Josephus had used the Greek term ioudaismos, which
some translate as "Judaism" today, even though he used it as an ethnic term, not one linked
to modern abstract concepts of religion as a set of beliefs. It was in the 19th century that the
terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" first emerged. Throughout its
long history, Japan had no concept of "religion" since there was no corresponding Japanese
word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast
of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among
other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea.
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According to the philologist Max Mller in the 19th century, the root of the English word
"religion", the Latin religio, was originally used to mean only "reverence for God or the gods,
careful pondering of divine things, piety" (which Cicero further derived to mean "diligence").

[18]

Max Mller 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".
[19]

[20]

Many languages have words that can be translated as "religion", but they may use them in a
very different way, and some have no word for religion at all. For example,
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.
[21][22]

There is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish
clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. One of its central concepts is
"halakha", sometimes translated as "law", which guides religious practice and belief and
many aspects of daily life.
[23]

The use of other terms, such as obedience to God or Islam are likewise grounded in
particular histories and vocabularies.
[24]

Definitions
There are numerous definitions of religion and only a few are stated here. The typical
dictionary definition of religion refers to a "belief in, or the worship of, a god or gods" or the
"service and worship of God or the supernatural". However, writers and scholars have
expanded upon the "belief in god" definitions as insufficient to capture the diversity of
religious thought and experience.
[25]

[26]

Peter Mandaville and Paul James 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 sociallygrounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing". This definition is intended,
they write, to get away from the modernist dualisms or dichotomous understandings of
immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and sacredness/secularity.
[27]

Urarina shaman, Peru, 1988

Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion as "the belief in spiritual beings". He argued, back in
1871, 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
[28]

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.
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 order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an
aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely 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 to
demonstrate it". The theologian Antoine Vergote 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"; he took the term
"supernatural" simply to mean whatever transcends the powers of nature or human agency.
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The sociologist 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 forbiddenbeliefs 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 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.
[32]

[note 2]

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