From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Religion is a
cultural system of designated
behaviors and practices,
morals,
worldviews,
texts,
sanctified places,
prophecies,
ethics, or
organizations, that relates humanity to
supernatural,
transcendental, or
spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.
Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the
divine,
sacred things,
faith, a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include
rituals,
sermons, commemoration or veneration (of
deities),
sacrifices,
festivals,
feasts,
trances,
initiations,
funerary services,
matrimonial services,
meditation,
prayer,
music,
art,
dance,
public service, or other aspects of human
culture. Religions have
sacred histories and
narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, and
symbols and
holy places, that aim mostly to give a
meaning to life.
Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by
followers to be true, that have the side purpose of explaining the
origin of life, the
universe, and other things. Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of
religious beliefs.
There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, but about 84% of the world's population is affiliated with one of the five largest religion groups, namely
Christianity,
Islam,
Hinduism,
Buddhism or forms of
folk religion. The
religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion,
atheists, and
agnostics.
While the religiously unaffiliated have grown globally, many of the
religiously unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs.
The
study of religion encompasses a wide variety of academic disciplines, including
theology,
comparative religion and social scientific studies.
Theories of religion offer various explanations for the origins and workings of religion, including the ontological foundations of religious
being and
belief.
Concept and etymology
Religion (from O.Fr.
religion religious community, from L.
religionem (nom.
religio) "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods, sense of right, moral obligation, sanctity", "obligation, the bond between man and the gods") is derived from the Latin
religiō, the ultimate origins of which are obscure. One possible interpretation traced to
Cicero, connects
lego read, i.e.
re (again) with
lego in the sense of choose, go over again or consider carefully. The definition of
religio by
Cicero is
cultum deorum, "the proper performance of rites in veneration of the gods." Julius Caesar used
religio to mean "obligation of an oath" when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used the term
religio on elephants in that they venerate the sun and the moon. 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 given by
Lactantius in
Divinae institutiones, IV, 28. 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'".
In classic antiquity, 'religio' broadly meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty to anything. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root
religio
was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts;
never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general,
religio referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God.
Religio
was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a
relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions such as
hesitation, caution, anxiety, fear; feelings of being bound, restricted,
inhibited; which arose from heightened attention in any mundane
context. The term was also closely related to other terms like
scrupulus which meant "very precisely" and some Roman authors related the term
superstitio, which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame, to
religio at times. When
religio came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders.
The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious things were
separated from worldly things, was not used before the 1500s.
The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the
domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities.
In the ancient Greece, the Greek term
threskeia was loosely translated into Latin as
religio
in late antiquity. The term was sparsely used in classical Greece but
became more frequently used in the writings of Josephus in the first
century CE. It was used in mundane contexts and could mean multiple
things from respectful fear to excessive or harmfully distracting
practices of others; to cultic practices. It was often contrasted with
the Greek word
deisidaimonia which meant too much fear.
The modern concept of religion, as an abstraction that entails
distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines, is a recent invention in the
English language. Such usage began with texts from the 17th century due
to events such the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant
Reformation and globalization in the age of exploration, which involved
contact with numerous foreign cultures with non-European languages.
Some argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply the term religion to non-Western cultures. Others argue that using religion on non-Western cultures distorts what people do and believe.
The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,
despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran,
and others did not have a word or even 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, 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,
meaning the walk or path sometimes translated as law, which guides
religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life.
Even though the beliefs and traditions of Judaism are found in the
ancient world, ancient Jews saw Jewish identity as being about an ethnic
or national identity and did not entail a compulsory belief system or
regulated rituals. Even in the 1st century CE, 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 Jews began to see their ancestral culture as a religion analogous to Christianity. The Greek word
threskeia, which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus, is found in the New Testament.
Threskeia
is sometimes translated as religion in today's translations, 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.
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.
Throughout the Americas, Native Americans never had a concept of
"religion" and any suggestion otherwise is a colonial imposition by
Christians.
Though traditions, sacred texts, and practices have existed
throughout time, most cultures did not align with Western conceptions of
religion since they did not separate everyday life from the sacred. In
the 18th and 19th centuries, the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism,
Confucianism, and
world religions first entered the English language. No one self-identified as a Hindu or Buddhist or other similar terms before the 1800s. "Hindu" has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the
Indian subcontinent.
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.
According to the
philologist Max Müller 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).
Max Müller
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.
Definition
Scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. There are,
however, two general definition systems: the sociological/functional
and the phenomenological/philosophical.
Modern Western
Religion is a
modern Western concept. Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages. Scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition. Others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures.
An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about ever defining the essence of religion.
They observe that the way we use the concept today is a particularly
modern construct that would not have been understood through much of
history and in many cultures outside the West (or even in the West until
after the
Peace of Westphalia). The MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions states:
The very attempt to define
religion, to find some distinctive or possibly unique essence or set of
qualities that distinguish the religious from the remainder of human
life, is primarily a Western concern. The attempt is a natural
consequence of the Western speculative, intellectualistic, and
scientific disposition. It is also the product of the dominant Western
religious mode, what is called the Judeo-Christian climate or, more
accurately, the theistic inheritance from Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. The theistic form of belief in this tradition, even when
downgraded culturally, is formative of the dichotomous Western view of
religion. That is, the basic structure of theism is essentially a
distinction between a transcendent deity and all else, between the
creator and his creation, between God and man.
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
took the term supernatural simply to mean whatever transcends the
powers of nature or human agency. He 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.
Peter Mandaville and
Paul James
intended to get away from the modernist dualisms or dichotomous
understandings of immanence/transcendence, spirituality/materialism, and
sacredness/secularity. They 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 socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing.
According to the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Religions, there is an
experiential aspect to religion which can be found in almost every
culture:
[…] almost every known culture
[has] a depth dimension in cultural experiences […] toward some sort of
ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the
rest of life. When more or less distinct patterns of behavior are built
around this depth dimension in a culture, this structure constitutes
religion in its historically recognizable form. Religion is the
organization of life around the depth dimensions of experience—varied in
form, completeness, and clarity in accordance with the environing
culture.
Classical
Budazhap Shiretorov (Будажап Цыреторов), the head shaman of the religious community Altan Serge (Алтан Сэргэ) in Buryatia.
Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as
das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as "the feeling of absolute dependence".
His contemporary
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as "the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit."
Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion in 1871 as "the belief in spiritual beings". He argued 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 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.
In his book
The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist
William James
defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual
men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they may consider the divine". By the term divine James meant "any object that is god
like, whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.
The sociologist
Émile 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 forbidden—beliefs 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.
Echoes of James' and Durkheim's definitions are to be found in the writings of, for example,
Frederick Ferré who defined religion as "one's way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively". Similarly, for the theologian
Paul Tillich, faith is "the state of being ultimately concerned", which "is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man's spiritual life."
When religion is seen in terms of sacred, divine, intensive
valuing, or ultimate concern, then it is possible to understand why
scientific findings and philosophical criticisms (e.g., those made by
Richard Dawkins) do not necessarily disturb its adherents.
Aspects
Beliefs
Traditionally,
faith,
in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious
beliefs. The interplay between faith and reason, and their use as
perceived support for religious beliefs, have been a subject of interest
to philosophers and theologians.
Mythology
The word myth has several meanings.
- A traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves
to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice,
belief, or natural phenomenon;
- A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
- A metaphor for the spiritual potentiality in the human being.
Ancient
polytheistic religions, such as those of
Greece,
Rome, and
Scandinavia, are usually categorized under the heading of
mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or
cultures in development, are similarly called myths in the
anthropology of religion.
The term myth can be used pejoratively by both religious and
non-religious people. By defining another person's religious stories and
beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real or true than
one's own religious stories and beliefs.
Joseph Campbell remarked, "Mythology is often thought of as
other people's religions, and religion can be defined as mis-interpreted mythology."
In sociology, however, the term myth has a non-pejorative
meaning. There, myth is defined as a story that is important for the
group whether or not it is objectively or provably true. Examples include the
resurrection of their real-life founder
Jesus,
which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from
sin, is symbolic of the power of life over death, and is also said to be
a historical event. But from a mythological outlook, whether or not the
event actually occurred is unimportant. Instead, the
symbolism
of the death of an old life and the start of a new life is what is most
significant. Religious believers may or may not accept such symbolic
interpretations.
Worldview
Practices
The practices of a religion may include
rituals,
sermons, commemoration or veneration (of a
deity,
gods, or
goddesses),
sacrifices,
festivals,
feasts,
trances,
initiations,
funerary services,
matrimonial services,
meditation,
prayer,
religious music,
religious art,
sacred dance,
public service, or other aspects of human culture.
Social organisation
Religions have a societal basis, either as a living tradition which is carried by lay participants, or with an organized
clergy, and a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership.
Academic study
Theories
Origins and development
The origin of religion is uncertain. There are a number of theories regarding the subsequent origins of religious practices.
According to
anthropologists
John Monaghan and Peter Just, "Many of the great world religions appear
to have begun as revitalization movements of some sort, as the vision
of a charismatic prophet fires the imaginations of people seeking a more
comprehensive answer to their problems than they feel is provided by
everyday beliefs. Charismatic individuals have emerged at many times and
places in the world. It seems that the key to long-term success—and
many movements come and go with little long-term effect—has relatively
little to do with the prophets, who appear with surprising regularity,
but more to do with the development of a group of supporters who are
able to institutionalize the movement."
The
development of religion
has taken different forms in different cultures. Some religions place
an emphasis on belief, while others emphasize practice. Some religions
focus on the subjective experience of the religious individual, while
others consider the activities of the religious community to be most
important. Some religions claim to be universal, believing their
laws and
cosmology
to be binding for everyone, while others are intended to be practiced
only by a closely defined or localized group. In many places, religion
has been associated with public institutions such as
education,
hospitals, the
family,
government, and
political hierarchies.
Anthropologists John Monoghan and Peter Just state that, "it
seems apparent that one thing religion or belief helps us do is deal
with problems of human life that are significant, persistent, and
intolerable. One important way in which religious beliefs accomplish
this is by providing a set of ideas about how and why the world is put
together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with
misfortune."
Cultural system
While religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion, used in
religious studies courses, was proposed by
Clifford Geertz, who simply called it a "cultural system". A critique of Geertz's model by
Talal Asad categorized religion as "an
anthropological category".
Richard Niebuhr's (1894–1962) five-fold classification of the
relationship between Christ and culture, however, indicates that
religion and culture can be seen as two separate systems, though not
without some interplay.
Social constructionism
One modern academic theory of religion,
social constructionism, says that religion is a modern concept that suggests all
spiritual practice and
worship follows a model similar to the
Abrahamic religions as an orientation system that helps to interpret reality and define human beings.
Among the main proponents of this theory of religion are Daniel
Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Talal Asad, and Jason Ānanda Josephson.
The social constructionists argue that religion is a modern concept that
developed from Christianity and was then applied inappropriately to
non-Western cultures.
Cognitive science
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and
behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary
sciences. The field employs methods and theories from a very broad range
of disciplines, including:
cognitive psychology,
evolutionary psychology,
cognitive anthropology,
artificial intelligence,
cognitive neuroscience,
neurobiology,
zoology, and
ethology.
Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire,
generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by
means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
Hallucinations and delusions related to religious content occurs in about 60% of people with
schizophrenia.
While this number varies across cultures, this had led to theories
about a number of influential religious phenomenon and possible relation
to psychotic disorders. A number of prophetic experiences are
consistent with psychotic symptoms, although retrospective diagnoses are
practically impossible. Schizophrenic episodes are also experienced by people who do not have belief in gods.
Comparativism
Comparative religion is the branch of the
study of religions
concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices
of the world's religions. In general, the comparative study of religion
yields a deeper understanding of the fundamental philosophical concerns
of religion such as
ethics,
metaphysics, and the nature and form of
salvation.
Studying such material is meant to give one a richer and more
sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the
sacred,
numinous,
spiritual and
divine.
Classification
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic practice of
comparative religion divided religious belief into philosophically defined categories called world religions. Some academics
studying the subject have divided religions into three broad categories:
- world religions, a term which refers to transcultural, international religions;
- indigenous religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or nation-specific religious groups; and
- new religious movements, which refers to recently developed religions.
Some recent scholarship has argued that not all types of religion are
necessarily separated by mutually exclusive philosophies, and
furthermore that the utility of ascribing a practice to a certain
philosophy, or even calling a given practice religious, rather than
cultural, political, or social in nature, is limited.
The current state of psychological study about the nature of
religiousness suggests that it is better to refer to religion as a
largely invariant phenomenon that should be distinguished from cultural
norms (i.e. religions).
Morphological classification
Some scholars classify religions as either
universal religions that seek worldwide acceptance and actively look for new converts, or
ethnic religions that are identified with a particular ethnic group and do not seek converts.
Others reject the distinction, pointing out that all religious
practices, whatever their philosophical origin, are ethnic because they
come from a particular culture. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Jainism are universal religions while Hinduism and Judaism are ethnic religions.
Demographical classification
The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to
account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for
Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of
syncretism) and traditional folk religion.
A global poll in 2012 surveyed 57 countries and reported that 59% of the world's population identified as religious, 23% as
not religious, 13% as convinced
atheists, and also a 9% decrease in identification as religious when compared to the 2005 average from 39 countries.
A follow-up poll in 2015 found that 63% of the globe identified as
religious, 22% as not religious, and 11% as convinced 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 for
syncretism.
Specific religions
Abrahamic
Judaism
The Torah is the primary sacred text of Judaism.
Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion, originating in the people of
ancient Israel and Judea. The
Torah is its foundational text, and is part of the larger text known as the
Tanakh or
Hebrew Bible. It is supplemented by oral tradition, set down in written form in later texts such as the
Midrash and the
Talmud.
Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological
positions, and forms of organization. Within Judaism there are a variety
of movements, most of which emerged from
Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and
commandments to
Moses on
Mount Sinai in the form of both the
Written and
Oral Torah; historically, this assertion was challenged by various groups. The
Jewish people were scattered after the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Today there are about 13 million Jews, about 40 per cent living in Israel and 40 per cent in the United States. The largest
Jewish religious movements are
Orthodox Judaism (
Haredi Judaism and
Modern Orthodox Judaism),
Conservative Judaism and
Reform Judaism.
Christianity
Jesus is the central figure of Christianity.
- The Catholic Church, led by the Bishop of Rome and the bishops worldwide in communion with him, is a communion of 24 Churches sui iuris, including the Latin Church and 23 Eastern Catholic churches, such as the Maronite Catholic Church.
- Eastern Christianity, which include Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Church of the East.
- Protestantism, separated from the Catholic Church in the 16th-century Protestant Reformation and is split into thousands of denominations. Major branches of Protestantism include Anglicanism, Baptists, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Methodism, though each of these contain many different denominations or groups.
There are also smaller groups, including:
Islam
Islam is based on the
Quran, one of the
holy books considered by Muslims to be
revealed by
God, and on the
teachings (hadith) of the
Islamic prophet Muhammad,
a major political and religious figure of the 7th century CE. Islam is
based on the unity of all religious philosophies and accepts all of the
Abrahamic prophets of Judaism, Christianity and other Abrahamic religions before
Muhammad. It is the most widely practiced religion of
Southeast Asia,
North Africa,
Western Asia, and
Central Asia, while Muslim-majority countries also exist in parts of
South Asia,
Sub-Saharan Africa, and
Southeast Europe. There are also several
Islamic republics, including
Iran,
Pakistan,
Mauritania, and
Afghanistan.
- Sunni Islam is the largest denomination within Islam and follows the Quran, the hadiths which record the sunnah, whilst placing emphasis on the sahabah.
- Shia Islam is the second largest denomination of Islam and its adherents believe that Ali succeeded Muhammad and further places emphasis on Muhammad's family.
- Ahmadiyya adherents believe that the awaited Imam Mahdi and the Promised Messiah has arrived, believed to be Mirza Ghulam Ahmad by Ahmadis.
- There are also Muslim revivalist movements such as Muwahhidism and Salafism.
Other
The
Bahá'í Faith
is an Abrahamic religion founded in 19th-century Iran and since then
has spread worldwide. It teaches unity of all religious philosophies and
accepts all of the prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well
as additional prophets including its founder
Bahá'u'lláh. One of its divisions is the
Orthodox Bahá'í Faith.
Smaller regional Abrahamic groups also exist, including
Samaritanism (primarily in Israel and the West Bank), the
Rastafari movement (primarily in Jamaica), and
Druze (primarily in Syria and Lebanon).
East Asian
East Asian religions (also known as Far Eastern religions or Taoic
religions) consist of several religions of East Asia which make use of
the concept of Tao (in Chinese) or Dō (in Japanese or Korean). They
include:
Taoism and Confucianism
- Taoism and Confucianism, as well as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese religion influenced by Chinese thought.
Chinese folk religion
- Chinese folk religion: the indigenous religions of the Han Chinese, or, by metonymy, of all the populations of the Chinese cultural sphere. It includes the syncretism of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, Wuism, as well as many new religious movements such as Chen Tao, Falun Gong and Yiguandao.
- Other folk and new religions of East Asia and Southeast Asia such as Korean shamanism, Chondogyo, and Jeung San Do in Korea; Shinto, Shugendo, Ryukyuan religion, and Japanese new religions in Japan; Satsana Phi in Laos; Cao Đài, Hòa Hảo, and Vietnamese folk religion in Vietnam.
Dharmic (Indian)
Indian religions are practiced or were founded in the
Indian subcontinent. They are sometimes classified as the
dharmic religions, as they all feature
dharma, the specific law of reality and duties expected according to the religion.
Hinduism
- Hinduism is preferentially self-designated by the term Vaidika Dharma. It is a synecdoche describing the similar philosophies of Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and related groups practiced or founded in the Indian subcontinent. Concepts most of them share in common include karma, caste, reincarnation, mantras, yantras, and darśana. Hinduism is one of the most ancient of still-active religions, with origins perhaps as far back as prehistoric times. Hinduism is not a monolithic religion but a religious category containing dozens of separate philosophies amalgamated as Sanātana Dharma, which is the name by which Hinduism has been known throughout history by its followers.
Jainism
- Jainism, taught primarily by Rishabhanatha (the founder of ahimsa) is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence, truth and anekantavada for all forms of living beings in this universe; which helps them to eliminate all the Karmas, and hence to attain freedom from the cycle of birth and death (saṃsāra), that is, achieving nirvana. Jains are found mostly in India. According to Dundas, outside of the Jain tradition, historians date the Mahavira as about contemporaneous with the Buddha in the 5th-century BCE, and accordingly the historical Parshvanatha, based on the c. 250-year gap, is placed in 8th or 7th century BCE.
Buddhism
Sikhism
- Sikhism is a panentheistic religion founded on the teachings of Guru Nanak and ten successive Sikh gurus in 15th-century Punjab. It is the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, with approximately 30 million Sikhs. Sikhs are expected to embody the qualities of a Sant-Sipāhī—a saint-soldier, have control over one's internal vices and be able to be constantly immersed in virtues clarified in the Guru Granth Sahib. The principal beliefs of Sikhi are faith in Waheguru—represented by the phrase ik ōaṅkār, meaning one God, who prevails in everything, along with a praxis in which the Sikh is enjoined to engage in social reform through the pursuit of justice for all human beings.
Indigenous and folk
Indigenous religions or
folk religions refers to a broad category of traditional religions that can be characterised by
shamanism,
animism and
ancestor worship, where traditional means "indigenous, that which is aboriginal or foundational, handed down from generation to generation…".
These are religions that are closely associated with a particular group
of people, ethnicity or tribe; they often have no formal creeds or
sacred texts. Some faiths are
syncretic, fusing diverse religious beliefs and practices.
Folk religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where they are widely practiced, e.g. in China.
Traditional African
African traditional religion encompasses the traditional religious beliefs of people in Africa. In West Africa, these religions include the
Akan religion,
Dahomey (Fon) mythology,
Efik mythology,
Odinani,
Serer religion (A ƭat Roog), and
Yoruba religion, while
Bushongo mythology,
Mbuti (Pygmy) mythology,
Lugbara mythology,
Dinka religion, and
Lotuko mythology come from central Africa. Southern African traditions include
Akamba mythology,
Masai mythology,
Malagasy mythology,
San religion,
Lozi mythology,
Tumbuka mythology, and
Zulu mythology.
Bantu mythology is found throughout central, southeast, and southern Africa. In north Africa, these traditions include
Berber and
ancient Egyptian.
Iranian
Zoroastrianism is based on the teachings of prophet
Zoroaster in the 6th century BCE. Zoroastrians worship the
creator Ahura Mazda.
In Zoroastrianism, good and evil have distinct sources, with evil
trying to destroy the creation of Mazda, and good trying to sustain it.
New religious movements
- Shinshūkyō
is a general category for a wide variety of religious movements founded
in Japan since the 19th century. These movements share almost nothing
in common except the place of their founding. The largest religious
movements centered in Japan include Soka Gakkai, Tenrikyo, and Seicho-No-Ie among hundreds of smaller groups.
- Cao Đài is a syncretistic, monotheistic religion, established in Vietnam in 1926.
- Raëlism is a new religious movement founded in 1974 teaching that humans were created by aliens. It is numerically the world's largest UFO religion.
- Hindu reform movements, such as Ayyavazhi, Swaminarayan Faith and Ananda Marga, are examples of new religious movements within Indian religions.
- Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and has no accepted creed or theology.
- Noahidism is a monotheistic ideology based on the Seven Laws of Noah, and on their traditional interpretations within Rabbinic Judaism.
- Scientology
teaches that people are immortal beings who have forgotten their true
nature. Its method of spiritual rehabilitation is a type of counseling
known as auditing,
in which practitioners aim to consciously re-experience and understand
painful or traumatic events and decisions in their past in order to free
themselves of their limiting effects.
- Eckankar is a pantheistic religion with the purpose of making God an everyday reality in one's life.
- Wicca is a neo-pagan religion first popularised in 1954 by British civil servant Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of a God and Goddess.
- Druidry is a religion promoting harmony with nature, and drawing on the practices of the druids.
- There are various Neopagan movements that attempt to reconstruct or revive ancient pagan practices. These include Heathenry, Hellenism, and Kemeticism.
- Satanism is a broad category of religions that, for example, worship Satan as a deity (Theistic Satanism) or use Satan as a symbol of carnality and earthly values (LaVeyan Satanism and The Satanic Temple).
- Some forms of parody religion or fiction-based religion like Jediism, Pastafarianism, Dudeism, "Tolkien religion",
and others often develop their own writings, traditions, and cultural
expressions, and end up behaving like traditional religions.
Related aspects
Law
The study of law and religion is a relatively new field, with several
thousand scholars involved in law schools, and academic departments
including political science, religion, and history since 1980.
Scholars in the field are not only focused on strictly legal issues
about religious freedom or non-establishment, but also study religions
as they are qualified through judicial discourses or legal understanding
of religious phenomena. Exponents look at canon law, natural law, and
state law, often in a comparative perspective.
Specialists have explored themes in Western history regarding
Christianity and justice and mercy, rule and equity, and discipline and
love. Common topics of interest include marriage and the family and human rights. Outside of Christianity, scholars have looked at law and religion links in the Muslim Middle East and pagan Rome.
Studies have focused on
secularization.
In particular, the issue of wearing religious symbols in public, such
as headscarves that are banned in French schools, have received
scholarly attention in the context of human rights and feminism.
Science
The concepts of science and religion are a recent invention: the
term religion emerged in the 17th century in the midst of colonization
and globalization and the Protestant Reformation. The term science emerged in the 19th century out of
natural philosophy in the midst of attempts to narrowly define those who studied nature (
natural science), and the phrase religion and science emerged in the 19th century due to the reification of both concepts. It was in the 19th century that the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism first emerged. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin roots of both science (
scientia) and religion (
religio)
were understood as inner qualities of the individual or virtues, never
as doctrines, practices, or actual sources of knowledge.
In general the
scientific method gains knowledge by testing hypotheses to develop
theories through elucidation of facts or evaluation by
experiments and thus only answers
cosmological questions about the
universe that can be observed and measured. It develops
theories
of the world which best fit physically observed evidence. All
scientific knowledge is subject to later refinement, or even rejection,
in the face of additional evidence. Scientific theories that have an
overwhelming preponderance of favorable evidence are often treated as
de facto verities in general parlance, such as the theories of
general relativity and
natural selection to explain respectively the mechanisms of
gravity and
evolution.
Religion does not have a method per se partly because religions
emerge through time from diverse cultures and it is an attempt to find
meaning in the world, and to explain humanity's place in it and
relationship to it and to any posited entities. In terms of Christian
theology and ultimate truths, people rely on reason, experience,
scripture, and tradition to test and gauge what they experience and what
they should believe. Furthermore, religious models, understanding, and
metaphors are also revisable, as are scientific models.
Regarding religion and science,
Albert Einstein
states (1940): "For science can only ascertain what is, but not what
should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain
necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of
human thought and action; it cannot justifiably speak of facts and
relationships between facts…Now, even though the realms of religion and
science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other,
nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships
and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determine the
goals, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest
sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has
set up."
Morality
Religion and morality are not synonymous. While it is "an almost automatic assumption." in Christianity, morality can have a
secular basis.
The study of religion and morality can be contentious due to
ethnocentric views on morality, failure to distinguish between in group
and out group altruism, and inconsistent definitions of religiosity.
Politics
Impact
Religion has had a significant impact on the political system in many
countries. Notably, most Muslim-majority countries adopt various
aspects of
sharia, the Islamic law. Some countries even define themselves in religious terms, such as
The Islamic Republic of Iran. The sharia thus affects up to 23% of the global population, or 1.57 billion people who are
Muslims. However, religion also affects political decisions in many western countries. For instance, in the
United States, 51% of voters would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who did not believe in God, and only 6% more likely.
Christians make up 92% of members of the US Congress, compared with 71%
of the general public (as of 2014). At the same time, while 23% of U.S.
adults are religiously unaffiliated, only one member of Congress (
Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona), or 0.2% of that body, claims no religious affiliation. In most European countries, however, religion has a much smaller influence on politics although it used to be much more important. For instance,
same-sex marriage and
abortion were illegal in many European countries until recently, following Christian (usually
Catholic) doctrine. Several
European leaders are atheists (e.g.
France’s former president
Francois Hollande or Greece's prime minister
Alexis Tsipras). In Asia, the role of religion differs widely between countries. For instance,
India
is still one of the most religious countries and religion still has a
strong impact on politics, given that Hindu nationalists have been
targeting minorities like the Muslims and the Christians, who
historically belonged to the lower castes. By contrast, countries such as
China or
Japan are largely secular and thus religion has a much smaller impact on politics.
Secularism
Secularization is the transformation of the politics of a society
from close identification with a particular religion's values and
institutions toward nonreligious values and
secular institutions. The purpose of this is frequently modernization or protection of the populations religious diversity.
Economics
Average income correlates negatively with (self-defined) religiosity.
One study has found there is a negative correlation between self-defined religiosity and the wealth of nations.
In other words, the richer a nation is, the less likely its inhabitants
to call themselves religious, whatever this word means to them (Many
people identify themselves as part of a religion (not irreligion) but do
not self-identify as religious).
According to a study from 2015,
Christians hold the largest amount of wealth (55% of the total world wealth), followed by
Muslims (5.8%),
Hindus (3.3%) and
Jews (1.1%). According to the same study it was found that adherents under the classification
Irreligion or other religions hold about 34.8% of the total global wealth.
Health
Mayo Clinic
researchers examined the association between religious involvement and
spirituality, and physical health, mental health, health-related quality
of life, and other health outcomes. The authors reported that: "Most
studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are
associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity,
coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal
illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide."
The authors of a subsequent study concluded that the influence of
religion on health is largely beneficial, based on a review of related
literature.
According to academic James W. Jones, several studies have discovered
"positive correlations between religious belief and practice and mental
and physical health and longevity."
An analysis of data from the 1998 US General Social Survey,
whilst broadly confirming that religious activity was associated with
better health and well-being, also suggested that the role of different
dimensions of spirituality/religiosity in health is rather more
complicated. The results suggested "that it may not be appropriate to
generalize findings about the relationship between
spirituality/religiosity and health from one form of
spirituality/religiosity to another, across denominations, or to assume
effects are uniform for men and women.
Violence
Anthropologist Jack David Eller asserts that religion is not
inherently violent, arguing "religion and violence are clearly
compatible, but they are not identical." He asserts that "violence is
neither essential to nor exclusive to religion" and that "virtually
every form of religious violence has its nonreligious corollary."
Animal sacrifice
Done by some (but not all) religions,
animal sacrifice is the
ritual killing and offering of an animal to appease or maintain favour with a
deity. It has been banned in
India.
Superstition
Greek and Roman pagans, who saw their relations with the gods in
political and social terms, scorned the man who constantly trembled with
fear at the thought of the gods (
deisidaimonia), as a slave might fear a cruel and capricious master. The Romans called such fear of the gods
superstitio.
Ancient Greek historian
Polybius described superstition in
Ancient Rome as an
instrumentum regni, an instrument of maintaining the cohesion of the
Empire.
Superstition has been described as the non rational establishment of cause and effect.
Religion is more complex and is often composed of social institutions
and has a moral aspect. Some religions may include superstitions or make
use of magical thinking. Adherents of one religion sometimes think of
other religions as superstition.
Some
atheists,
deists, and
skeptics regard religious belief as superstition.
The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in
the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of
God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments.
The
Catechism of the Catholic Church
states that superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of
religion" (para. #2110). "Superstition," it says, "is a deviation of
religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even
affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an
importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or
necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs
to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions
that they demand is to fall into superstition. Cf. Matthew 23:16–22"
(para. #2111)
Agnosticism and atheism
The terms
atheist
(lack of belief in any gods) and agnostic (belief in the unknowability
of the existence of gods), though specifically contrary to theistic
(e.g. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) religious teachings, do not by
definition mean the opposite of religious. There are religions
(including Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism), in fact, that classify some
of their followers as agnostic, atheistic, or
nontheistic. The true opposite of religious is the word irreligious.
Irreligion describes an absence of any religion;
antireligion describes an active opposition or aversion toward religions in general.
Interfaith cooperation
Because religion continues to be recognized in Western thought as a universal impulse, many religious practitioners have aimed to band together in
interfaith dialogue, cooperation, and
religious peacebuilding. The first major dialogue was the
Parliament of the World's Religions at the 1893
Chicago World's Fair,
which affirmed universal values and recognition of the diversity of
practices among different cultures. The 20th century has been especially
fruitful in use of interfaith dialogue as a means of solving ethnic,
political, or even religious conflict, with
Christian–Jewish reconciliation representing a complete reverse in the attitudes of many Christian communities towards Jews.
Recent interfaith initiatives include A Common Word, launched in
2007 and focused on bringing Muslim and Christian leaders together, the "C1 World Dialogue", the Common Ground initiative between Islam and Buddhism, and a
United Nations sponsored "World Interfaith Harmony Week".
Culture
Culture and religion have usually been seen as closely related.
Paul Tillich looked at religion as the soul of culture and culture as the form or framework of religion. In his own words:
Religion as ultimate concern is the meaning-giving
substance of culture, and culture is the totality of forms in which the
basic concern of religion expresses itself. In abbreviation: religion is
the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion. Such a
consideration definitely prevents the establishment of a dualism of
religion and culture. Every religious act, not only in organized
religion, but also in the most intimate movement of the soul, is
culturally formed.
Ernst Troeltsch,
similarly, looked at culture as the soil of religion and thought that,
therefore, transplanting a religion from its original culture to a
foreign culture would actually kill it in the same manner that
transplanting a plant from its natural soil to an alien soil would kill
it. However, there have been many attempts in the modern pluralistic situation to distinguish culture from religion. Domenic Marbaniang has argued that elements grounded on beliefs of a
metaphysical nature (religious) are distinct from elements grounded on
nature and the natural (cultural). For instance, language (with its
grammar) is a cultural element while sacralization of language in which a
particular religious scripture is written is more often a religious
practice. The same applies to music and the arts.
Criticism
Criticism of religion is
criticism of the ideas, the truth, or the practice of religion, including its political and social implications.
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