Religion is a cultural system of beliefs, values, practices and behaviors that give meaning and purpose to life, promotes social stability, reinforces morality and ethics, provides psychological and physical well-being and may motivate people to work for positive social change. It often involves a belief in some kind of spiritual and supernatural worldview that may include the existence of gods, angels, spirits and demons. It also includes a range of rituals and ceremonies that are meant to express or evoke inner sentiments. For most religious people, there is an element of hope, which is that something beyond this life will be better – whether this involves a happy afterlife with a benevolent creator, rebirth and reincarnation, or some other form of eternal salvation.
Many theories of religion focus on the need to satiate human curiosity about the great mysteries of life and death, as well as a fear of uncontrollable forces that cannot be easily understood or tamed. In some cultures, these feelings resulted in the need to establish a religion that would answer these questions and provide hope of a better future.
The first such religions developed along river valleys, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, involving the worship of tribal totems and ancestors. In time, these gave way to more complex beliefs that included myths of creation and stories of guardian or protective gods. Along with these, a range of rituals and rules of behavior developed. Some of these have had a profound impact on civilizations, while others have been abandoned and replaced by more practical and utilitarian systems of governance.
For many scholars, it is a problem to define what constitutes religion. One approach, based on Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion, defines it as any set of practices that bring together people into a community, whether or not these activities involve beliefs in supernatural beings. This is known as the functional definition of religion.
Another approach is to define it as the beliefs that allow a person to make sense of their place in the universe, their relationship with the natural environment and their sense of what should be done and what should not be done. This is known as the doctrinal definition of religion, which is the most common among modern scholars.
A third way to understand religion is in terms of the functions it performs for individuals and communities. These are the ideas that distinguish religion from other social categories, such as art or literature, that have no specific content, but only a shared pattern of functioning. Haidt suggests that focusing on beliefs and subjective states obscures these other important aspects of religion. This is because the most important things that religions do are to provide ways for people to achieve the most important goals of their lives – proximate ones such as a wiser, more charitable or successful way of living, and ultimate ones involving a desire for a better afterlife, the forgiveness of wrongdoing and an understanding of what life is all about.