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The definition of religion is a controversial and complicated subject in religious studies with scholars failing to agree on any one definition. Oxford Dictionaries defines religion as the belief in and/or worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, ... The very attempt to define religion, to ...
The Latin term religiō, the origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin [2]), is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the end of the Roman Republic , notably by Cicero , in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus ".
The history of religion is the written record of human religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing ...
either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage; or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, saw religion as an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words: religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.
When explaining religion they reject divine or supernatural explanations for the status or origins of religions because they are not scientifically testable. [16] In fact, theorists such as Marett (an Anglican) excluded scientific results altogether, defining religion as the domain of the unpredictable and unexplainable; that is, comparative ...
Throughout the history of religious studies, there have been many attempts to define the term "religion". [13] Many of these have been monothetic , seeking to determine a key, essential element which all religions share, which can be used to define "religion" as a category, and which must be necessary in order for something to be classified as ...
The anthropology of religion, as a field, overlaps with but is distinct from the field of Religious Studies. The history of anthropology of religion is a history of striving to understand how other people view and navigate the world. This history involves deciding what religion is, what it does, and how it functions. [2]