"You can't understand the human race without understanding its passion to have gods." David Marr on religious belief in Australia
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What is Religion?

John Dickson

The universality of religion

No matter how educated, materialistic or secular Western society becomes, ‘religious’ questions just don’t go away. We appear to be incurably inquisitive about realities deeper than our investments, our holidays and our retirement packages. It’s as if something in our world or perhaps just in our heads continues to seduce us with questions of faith—Why are we here? What happens at death? To Whom should I pay homage?, and so on.

The social sciences confirm this impression. While we often hear of the decline in religion, the research reveals an enduring belief in both God and the soul. The World Values Survey conducted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (Ronald Inglehart et al., published 2000) revealed the following figures for Australia:
  every single society has made ‘religion’ a key component of its cultural life
 
 
 
  Belief in god: 80.1%
Belief in ‘soul’: 85.3%
Atheist: 5.3%
  

As we gaze down the immense corridor of centuries of historical research, it is no exaggeration to say that every single society, about which anthropologists and historians know anything significant, has made ‘religion’ a key component of its cultural life. Australian Aborigines, native Americans, pre-Anglo Celts, Germanic Goths, ancient Mongols and modern Westerners, Easterners, Middle Easterners Africans—all of them have been conspicuously ‘religious’.

Even the little we know about Neanderthal man, an early form of Homo sapiens (100,000—30,000 years ago) suggests a religious dimension and a belief in an afterlife: the smearing of bones with red ocher is thought by many to symbolize life-giving blood and revived flesh; the burial of the dead with animal bones and an axe may suggest a hope of a productive afterlife.

The famous prehistoric paintings in the South of France (Lascaux: dated 15,000 BC) depict not only buffalo and deer but also strange symbols which scholars recognize as early shamanistic symbols, that is, symbols associated with a shaman or ‘wise man’ who performs magic and is able to communicate with the spirit world.

 Religious talk is, in the truest meaning of the phrase, ‘common sense.’ Like the human fascination with art and music, or our desire for social organisation and personal intimacy, religious questions are among the few universally shared premises of humanity throughout time. It is common sense.
  Many significant abstract concepts defy precise definition—love, mind, science, art   


Despite its ubiquity, religion is very difficult to define. Amongst philosophers of religion there is no universally accepted definition.

Studying the origin of the word tells us very little. Even the Oxford English Reference Dictionary flounders:

  Religion (1) the belief in a superhuman controlling power, especially in a personal God or gods entitled to obedience and worship; (2) the expression of this in worship; (3) a particular system of faith and worship.
  

There at least two reasons for this definitional difficulty: (1) Many significant abstract concepts defy precise definition—love, mind, science, art; (2) The vast differences between the things termed ‘religion’ make the definition very elusive (compare aboriginal reverence for the earth and for ancestors with Buddhist atheism with Islamic theism).

Scholars have offered many definitions of religion over the years. The following examples touch the tip of the iceberg.

Theistic definition

Religion may be defined in terms of belief in and/or worship of a god or gods. James Martineau (19th century English philosopher 1805-1900) wrote:

  Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind. 
 

Such a definition certainly embraces clearly theistic religions like Judaism and Islam, but it has more difficulty with monistic religions (some forms of Hinduism) and non-theistic ones like Theravada Buddhism.

Supernatural definition

Related to the theistic definition is what you might call simply a supernatural definition. Here, religion is said to be characterized by beings that transcend physical reality. The Canadian-born American anthropologist Anthony Wallace (Religion: an Anthropological View. New York: Random House, 1966, 52) writes:

  It is the premise of every religion—and this premise is religion’s defining characteristic—that souls, supernatural beings, and supernatural forces exist. 
 

On this definition, again, Theravada Buddhism, with its denial of the soul and deities, would have to be excluded. As well as excluding one of the major religions of the world, a supernatural definition of religion would probably unwittingly include many other human beliefs and practices not generally classed as religion—magic, astrology, necromancy and so on.

Sacral definition

Religion is reverence and awe toward something deemed to be ‘sacred’. Cornelius Petrus Tiele (1830-1902), a pioneer in the comparative study of religion said:

  Religion is, in truth, that pure and reverential disposition or frame of mind which we call piety. 
 

There is a problem, of course, with defining religion in terms of the word ‘sacred’ or ‘piety’. These terms generally take their meaning from the thing we’re trying to define in the first place: ‘religion’. There is, then, a circularity to this definition.

Bifurcation definition

‘Bifurcation’ is the division of something into two branches or parts. In a religious context we could talk about the division between temporal and eternal, spiritual and material, empirical and supra-empirical, sacred and secular, and so on. A bifurcation definition of religion is one that sees religion as primarily concerned with describing and regulating this distinction between sacred and profane. Hence, the sociologist Michael Hill of the London School of Economics writes:

  religion can be defined as the set of beliefs which postulate and seek to regulate the distinction between an empirical reality and a related and significant supra-empirical segment of reality; the language and symbols which are used in relation to this distinction; and the activities and institutions which are concerned with its regulation (A Sociology of Religion. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973, 42-43).
 

One criticism of this definition is that many of the religions of the world would reject the distinction between sacred and secular, spiritual and material, and so on. A definition of religion that ignores a basic premise of many of the actual religions is always going to be problematic to many.

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