Religion is a cultural system of beliefs, practices and ethics. Its importance lies in the social, economic and psychological well-being of individuals, families, nations and world organizations. It promotes health, education, economic development, self-control, morality, and empathy. It provides a framework within which people can deal with the vicissitudes of life and cope with the problems of death, illness and loss. Religions have also a long history of promoting social cohesion, civility and peace, although they have also been responsible for persecution, murder and war throughout the ages.
The concept of religion has been a subject of much philosophical discussion, and there is no agreed definition. One approach focuses on the existence of specific beliefs, such as those in the afterlife and supernatural beings. Another focuses on the practice of religious ritual, such as prayer and meditation. A third focuses on the ethical teachings of the major religions, including compassion and forgiveness. Yet another approach, pioneered by Rodney Needham, focuses on the ways in which religious behavior affects a person’s values and emotions, and the extent to which it creates community.
While the phenomenological and functional approaches to religion offer useful distinctions, they do not address all aspects of what it is to be religious. This is a result of the fact that religions are based on different worldviews and are therefore characterized by different types of practices, values and emotions. Moreover, as Ninian Smart has noted, “there is no set number of characteristics that must be present to constitute a religion.” Indeed, as with other abstract concepts used to sort cultural types (such as literature and democracy), there are many ways in which the same practices can be classified as religions.
Moreover, the concept of religion is an ongoing process of creation. Even the earliest religious systems were successful protective systems that enabled humans to explore their environment and their own potentialities. These explorations, which are essentially the work of the body (hence the term somatic exploration, from the Greek for ‘body’), and which were driven by a need to survive, opened the way to religion.
The emergence of the modern world religions, from Judaism and Christianity to Islam and Hinduism, reflects this continuous process of creating religious concepts. However, this does not mean that there are no universals to be found in religion, because there are. Rather, the question is how one can distinguish, on a comparative basis, between concepts such as religio, which are derived from specific cultural epochs and theories of religion, and those that emerge from continued comparative study of new and varied historical materials.