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Religion is the adherence to codified beliefs and rituals that generally involve a faith in a spiritual nature and a study of inherited ancestral traditions, knowledge and wisdom related to understanding human life. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to faith as well as to the larger shared systems of belief.
Religion is a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; the service or worship of God or the supernatural. [60] Religious belief is distinct from religious practice and from religious behaviours—with some believers not practicing religion and some practitioners not believing religion.
"A religion," writes Durkheim, "is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into a single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." [2] Durkheim concludes:
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements [1] —although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely ...
He suggests that we should perform the epoche as a means to engage in cross-cultural studies. In doing so, we can take the beliefs, symbols, rituals etc. of the other from within their own perspective, rather than imposing ours on them. Another earlier scholar who employs the phenomenological method for studying religion is Gerardus van der Leeuw.
Syncretism (/ ˈ s ɪ ŋ k r ə t ɪ z əm, ˈ s ɪ n-/) [1] is the practice of combining different beliefs and various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions , especially in the theology and mythology of religion , thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an ...
While the word religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion used in religious studies courses defines it 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 ...
Historically, the words religious and spiritual have been used synonymously to describe all the various aspects of the concept of religion. [1] However, religion is a highly contested term with scholars such as Russell McCutcheon arguing that the term "religion" is used as a way to name a "seemingly distinct domain of diverse items of human activity and production". [6]