Religion is a cultural system of beliefs, moral values, practices and traditions that give meaning to people’s lives. It establishes a sense of belonging, provides the basis for ethical values and behaviors, provides security and comfort, offers a framework for the interpretation of the world, and can motivate people to work for social change.
Many religious practices involve a combination of ritual and symbolic interaction. Religions usually have sacred histories, narratives and mythologies that attempt to explain the origin of life, human nature and other phenomena. They may also have sacred spaces, symbols and artwork. They often involve a combination of emotions and experiences, including crying, laughing, chanting, trancelike conditions and a feeling of oneness with others. Religions offer people the means to attain their most important goals, whether proximate (a wiser, more charitable, or successful way of living) or ultimate (the end of this or any other person’s life and that of the universe itself).
Religions are also social systems, creating structures in which sanctions and rewards, approval and disapproval, inspiration and ideation, can be communicated to members. They create contexts of security, in which the limits of what is possible are recognized and understood.
The development of ethnological and philological methods in the nineteenth century brought a greater awareness of the wide diversity of religious practices to the attention of scholars. This led to a revival of the study of religion, including new approaches based on history, anthropology and sociology. In addition, some philosophers, such as Edward Tylor (1832-1902) and Paul Tillich (1901-1963), proposed minimum criterion definitions of religion that concentrate on belief in certain kinds of spiritual beings. Other critics, however, have gone further in attacking the notion of a thing called ‘religion’ as an example of a category that was invented and then semantically expanded to include things that do not have any substance at all (cf. Possamai, 2018).