Religion
Religion
This article is about a philosophical set of beliefs
about the meaning of existence.
Not to be confused with Region or Religious denomination.
"Religious" redirects here. For a member of
a Catholic religious
institute, see Religious (Catholicism).
Religion is a cultural system of behaviors and practices, world views, sacred texts, holy
places, ethics, and societal organisation that relate humanity to
what an anthropologist has called "an order of existence". 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 God or 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. About 84% of the
world's population is affiliated with one of the five largest religions, namely Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or forms of folk religion.
With
the onset of the modernisation of and the scientific revolution in the western
world, some aspects of religion have cumulatively been criticized. The
religiously unaffiliated include atheists (who reject belief in the existence of deities) and agnostics (who believe that
the truth of certain claims – especially metaphysical and religious claims such
as whether God, the divine or the supernatural exist – are unknown and perhaps
unknowable). While the religiously unaffiliated have grown globally, many of
the unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs. About 16% of the
world's population is religiously unaffiliated.
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.
Etymology and history of the concept of Religion
Religion
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 religiō,
the ultimate origins of which are obscure. One possible interpretation traced
to Cicero, connects lego "read",
i.e. re (again) with legoin
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'".
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.
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".
Some
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 pietyand 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.
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.
Faith
The
word religion is sometimes used
interchangeably with faith or set of duties; however, in the
words of Émile Durkheim,
religion differs from private belief in that it is "something eminently social".
Other terms
The
use of other terms, such as obedience to God or Islam are
likewise grounded in particular histories and vocabularies.
Definitions
Religion as modern
western construct
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.
Classical definitions
Urarina shaman, Peru, 1988
Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th
century defined religion as das
schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly
translated as "a feeling of absolute dependence".
His
contemporary 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 godlike,
whether it be a concrete deity or not" to which the
individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.
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 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. Richard Dawkins) do
not necessarily disturb its adherents.
Modern definitions
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 livedas
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.
Aspects
A
religion is a cultural system of behaviors and practices, world views, sacred
texts, holy places, ethics, and societal organisation that relate humanity to
an order of existence.
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, music, art, dance, public service, or
other aspects of human culture.
Worldview
Religions
have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies which may be
preserved in sacred scriptures, and symbols and holy places, that
aim to explain the meaning of life, the origin of life, or
the Universe.
Religious 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 actual or perceived support for religious beliefs,
have been a subject of interest to philosophers and theologians.
Mythology
The
word myth has several
meanings.
1.
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;
2.
A person or thing
having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; or
3.
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 Campbellremarked,
"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.
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.
Types and demographics
The
list of still-active religious movements given here is an attempt to summarize
the most important regional and philosophical influences on local communities,
but it is by no means a complete description of every religious community, nor
does it explain the most important elements of individual religiousness.
Types of religion
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 subjecthave
divided religions into three broad categories:
1.
world religions, a
term which refers to transcultural, international faiths;
2.
indigenous
religions, which refers to smaller, culture-specific or
nation-specific religious groups; and
3.
new religious movements, which refers to recently
developed faiths.
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").
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.
Demographics
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.
Five largest
religions
|
2010 (billion)
|
2010 (%)
|
2000 (billion)
|
2000 (%)
|
Demographics
|
Christianity
|
2.2
|
32%
|
2.0
|
33%
|
Christianity by country
|
Islam
|
1.6
|
23%
|
1.2
|
19.6%
|
Islam by country
|
Hinduism
|
1.0
|
15%
|
0.811
|
13.4%
|
Hinduism by country
|
Buddhism
|
0.5
|
7%
|
0.360
|
5.9%
|
Buddhism by country
|
Folk religion
|
0.4
|
6%
|
0.385
|
6.4%
|
|
Total
|
5.8
|
84%
|
4.8
|
78.3%
|
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.
Abrahamic
Abrahamic
religions are monotheistic religions which
believe they descend from Abraham.
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.
Christianity is based on the life
and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (1st century) as
presented in the New Testament. The
Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and as Savior and Lord. Almost
all Christians believe in the Trinity, which
teaches the unity of Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. Most
Christians can describe their faith with the Nicene Creed. As the
religion of Byzantine Empire in the first
millennium and of Western Europe during the time of
colonization, Christianity has been propagated throughout the world. The main
divisions of Christianity are, according to the number of adherents:
·
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:
·
Restorationism, the
belief that Christianity should be restored (as opposed to reformed) along the
lines of what is known about the apostolic early church.
·
Latter Day Saint movement, founded by Joseph Smith in the late 1820s.
·
Jehovah's
Witnesses, founded in the late 1870s by Charles
Taze Russell.
Islam
Muslimscircumambulating the Kaaba, the most sacred site in 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 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
denominations of Islam include Nation of Islam, Ibadi, Sufism, Quranism, Mahdavia, and non-denominational Muslims. Wahhabism is the dominant
Muslim schools of thoughtin
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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 religions
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, as
well as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese religion influenced by Chinese
thought.
·
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.
Indian religions
Hindu statue of Lord Ramain Kalaram
Temple (India)
The Buddha, in a Sanskritmanuscript, Nālandā, Bihar,
India
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 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 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, taught
primarily by Parsva (9th century BCE)
and Mahavira (6th century BCE),
is an ancient Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence for all
forms of living beings in this world. Jains are found mostly in India.
Buddhism was founded by Siddhattha Gotama in the 6th century
BCE. Buddhists generally agree that Gotama aimed to help sentient beings end
their suffering (dukkha) by understanding
the true nature of phenomena,
thereby escaping the cycle of suffering and rebirth (saṃsāra),
that is, achieving nirvana.
·
Theravada Buddhism, which is
practiced mainly in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia
alongside folk religion, shares some characteristics of Indian religions. It is
based in a large collection of texts called the Pali Canon.
·
Mahayana Buddhism (or the
"Great Vehicle") under which are a multitude of doctrines that became
prominent in China and are still
relevant in
Vietnam, Korea, Japan and to a lesser
extent in
Europe and the United States. Mahayana Buddhism includes such
disparate teachings as Zen, Pure
Land, and Soka Gakkai.
·
Vajrayana Buddhism first
appeared in India in the 3rd century CE. It
is currently most prominent in the Himalaya regions and extends across
all of Asia (cf. Mikkyō).
·
Two notable new
Buddhist sects are Hòa Hảo and the Dalit Buddhist movement, which were developed
separately in the 20th century.
Fresco of Guru Nanak at Goindwal Sahib Gurdwara
Sikhism is a monotheistic
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.
Local religions
Indigenous and folk
Incense burner in China
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.
·
Australian Aboriginal religions.
·
Folk religions of
the Americas: Native American religions
Folk
religions are often omitted as a category in surveys even in countries where
they are widely practiced, e.g. in China.
African traditional
Shango,
the Orisha (god) of fire,
lightning, and thunder, in the Yoruba religion,
depicted on horseback
African traditional religion encompasses the
traditional religious beliefs of people in Africa. In north Africa, these
religions have included traditional Berber religion, ancient Egyptian religion, and Waaq. West African religions include Akan religion, Dahomey (Fon) mythology, Efik mythology, Odinani of the Igbo people, Serer religion, 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.
There
are also notable African diasporic religions practiced in the
Americas, such as Santeria, Candomble, Vodun, Lucumi, Umbanda, and Macumba.
Iranian
Zoroastrian Fire Temple
Iranian religions are ancient
religions whose roots predate the Islamization of Greater Iran.
Nowadays these religions are practiced only by minorities.
Zoroastrianism is based on the
teachings of prophet Zoroaster in the 6th century
BC. 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.
Mandaeism is a monotheistic religion with a
strongly dualistic worldview.
Mandaeans are sometime labeled as the "Last Gnostics".
Kurdish religions include the
traditional beliefs of the Yazidi, Alevi, and Ahl-e Haqq.
Sometimes these are labeled Yazdânism.
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.
·
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).
Sociological classifications of
religious movements suggest
that within any given religious group, a community can resemble various types
of structures, including "churches", "denominations",
"sects", "cults", and "institutions".
Interfaith
cooperation
Because
religion continues to be recognized in Western thought as a universal impulse[citation needed],
many religious practitioners have
aimed to band together in interfaithdialogue,
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".
Academic study of religion
A
number of disciplines study the phenomenon of religion: theology, comparative
religion, history
of religion, evolutionary origin of religions, anthropology of religion, psychology of religion, including neurosciences of religion and evolutionary psychology of religion, sociology of religion, and Law and Religion.
Daniel
L. Pals mentions eight classical theories of religion, focusing on various
aspects of religion: animism and magic,
by E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer; the psycho-analytic approach of Sigmund Freud; and
further Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, E.E.
Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz.
Michael
Stausberg gives an overview of contemporary theories of religion, including cognitive and
biological approaches.
Comparative religion
Nicholas de Lange,
Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge
University, says that
The
comparative study of religions is an academic discipline which has been
developed within Christian theology faculties, and it has a tendency to force
widely differing phenomena into a kind of strait-jacket cut to a Christian
pattern. The problem is not only that other 'religions' may have little or
nothing to say about questions which are of burning importance for Christianity,
but that they may not even see themselves as religions in precisely the same
way in which Christianity sees itself as a religion.
Theories of religion
Origins and
development
The Yazılıkaya sanctuary in Turkey, with the
twelve gods of the underworld
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.
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.
Related aspects
Reason and science
Science acknowledges reason, empiricism, and evidence; and
religions include revelation, faith and sacredness whilst also
acknowledging philosophical and metaphysicalexplanations
with regard to the study of the universe. Both science and religion are not
monolithic, timeless, or static because both are complex social and cultural
endeavors that have changed through time across languages and cultures.
The
concepts of "science" and "religion" are a recent
invention: "religion" emerged in the 17th century in the midst of
colonization and globalization and the Protestant Reformation, "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 and religion
Many
religions have value frameworks regarding personal behavior meant to guide
adherents in determining between right and wrong. These include the Triple Jems of Jainism, Judaism's Halacha, Islam's Sharia, Catholicism's Canon Law, Buddhism's Eightfold Path, and Zoroastrianism's "good
thoughts, good words, and good deeds" concept, among others. Religion and
morality are not synonymous. Morality does not necessarily depend upon religion
although this is "an almost automatic assumption." According to The Westminster
Dictionary of Christian Ethics, religion and
morality "are to be defined differently and have no definitional
connections with each other. Conceptually and in principle, morality and a
religious value system are two distinct kinds of value systems or action
guides."
According
to global research done by Gallup on people from 145 countries, adherents of
all the major world religions who attended religious services in the past week
have higher rates of generosity such as donating money, volunteering, and
helping a stranger than do their coreligionists who did not attend services
(non-attenders). Even for people who were nonreligious, those who said they
attended religious services in the past week exhibited more generous behaviors. Another global
study by Gallup on people from 140 countries showed that highly religious
people are more likely to help others in terms of donating money, volunteering,
and helping strangers despite them having, on average, lower incomes than those
who are less religious or nonreligious.
A
comprehensive study by Harvard
University professor Robert Putnam found that
religious people are more charitable than their irreligious counterparts. The study revealed
that forty percent of worship
service attending
Americans volunteer regularly to help the poor and elderly as opposed to 15% of
Americans who never attend services. Moreover,
religious individuals are more likely than non-religious individuals to
volunteer for school and youth programs (36% vs. 15%), a neighborhood or civic
group (26% vs. 13%), and for health care (21% vs. 13%). Other research has
shown similar correlations between religiosity and giving.
Religious
belief appears to be the strongest predictor of charitable giving. One study found
that average charitable giving in 2000 by religious individuals ($2,210) was
over three times that of secular individuals ($642). Giving to non-religious
charities by religious individuals was $88 higher. Religious individuals are
also more likely to volunteer time, donate blood, and give back money when
accidentally given too much change. A
2007 study by the The Barna Group found that
"active-faith" individuals (those who had attended a church service
in the past week) reported that they had given on average $1,500 in 2006, while
"no-faith" individuals reported that they had given on average $200.
"Active-faith" adults claimed to give twice as much to
non-church-related charities as "no-faith" individuals claimed to
give. They were also more likely to report that they were registered to vote,
that they volunteered, that they personally helped someone who was homeless,
and to describe themselves as "active in the community."
Some
scientific studies show that the degree of religiosity is generally found to be
associated with higher ethical attitudes —
for example, surveys suggesting a positive connection between faith and
altruism. Survey
research suggests that believers do tend to hold different views than
non-believers on a variety of social, ethical and moral questions. According to
a 2003 survey conducted in the United States by The Barna Group,
those who described themselves as believers were less likely than those describing
themselves as atheists or agnostics to consider the following behaviors morally
acceptable: cohabitating with someone of the
opposite sex outside of marriage, enjoying sexual fantasies, having an abortion, sexual
relationships outside of marriage, gambling, looking at pictures of nudity or explicit
sexual behavior, getting drunk, and "having a sexual relationship
with someone of the same sex."
Politics
Religion
has 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 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.
Economics
Average income correlates negatively with
(self-defined) religiosity.
Further information: Religion and business and Wealth
and religion
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").
Sociologist
and political economist Max Weber has argued that
Protestant Christian countries are wealthier because of their Protestant work ethic.
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 Jewish (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.
Superstition
Superstition
has been described as "the incorrect establishment of cause and
effect" or a false conception of causation. Religion is more
complex and is mostly composed of social institutions and morality. But 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.
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.
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)
Secularism and
atheism
Ranjit
Singh established secular
rule over Punjab in the early 19th
century.
Secularisation
Secularization is the
transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and
institutions toward an inclusive and plural society free from religious
privilege, prejudice and discrimination.
The
term secularization is also used in the context of the lifting of the monastic
restrictions from a member of the clergy.
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.
Criticism of religious violence
Violence
The Crusades were a series of a
military campaigns fought mainly between Christian Europe and Muslims. Shown here
is a battle scene from the First Crusade.
Critics
like Hector Avalos Regina Schwartz, Christopher
Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have argued that
religions are inherently violent and harm to society by using violence to
promote their goals, in ways that are endorsed and exploited by their leaders.
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.
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