Concept

Religion

Nancystodd · Public domain · source

Overview

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.

The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.

There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, though nearly all of them have regionally based, relatively small followings. Four religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism—account for over 73% of the world's population, and 97.6% of the world either follows one of those four religions or identifies as nonreligious, meaning that the vast majority of remaining religions account for only 2.4% of the population combined. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists, and agnostics, although many in the demographic still have various religious beliefs. Many world religions are also organized religions, most definitively, including the Abrahamic religions Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the Baháʼí Faith, while others are arguably less so, in particular folk religions, indigenous religions, and some Eastern religions. A portion of the world's population are members of new religious movements. Scholars have indicated that global religiosity may be increasing due to religious countries having generally higher birth rates.

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

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Religion is discussed.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. This evolution of religion is in the main a disengagement of its own proper ideas from the adventitious notions which have crept into it by reason of the expression of its own ideas in terms of the imaginative picture…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
A world religion may lay claim to being such not merely on account of its wide acceptance, but also because of its ability to incorporate the elements of other religions. In a similar manner, and more particularly, a world religion is one that includes within itself elements representing past stages of its own development. Historically considered, religious elements are juxtaposed in such a manner that the religious…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Religion in the shape of mind‐cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure‐ house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive…
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
With the growing need for law and morality and the sense of the spirit’s essential liberty, there sets in a conflict of spirit with the religion of unfreedom. It is no use to organise political laws and arrangements on principles of equity and reason, so long as in religion the principle of unfreedom is not abandoned. A free state and a slavish religion are incompatible. It is silly to suppose that we may try to…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe…
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Religion

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Religion

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition