Religion

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.
The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.
There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, though nearly all of them have regionally based, relatively small followings. Four religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism—account for over 77% of the world's population, and 92% of the world either follows one of those four religions or identifies as nonreligious, meaning that the vast majority of remaining religions account for only 8% of the population combined. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists, and agnostics, although many in the demographic still have various religious beliefs. Many world religions are also organized religions, most definitively including the Abrahamic religions Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the Baháʼí Faith, while others are arguably less so, in particular folk religions, indigenous religions, and some Eastern religions. A portion of the world's population are members of new religious movements. Scholars have indicated that global religiosity may be increasing due to religious countries having generally higher birth rates.
The study of religion comprises a wide variety of academic disciplines, including theology, philosophy of religion, comparative religion, and social scientific studies. Theories about religion offer various explanations for its origins and workings, including the ontological foundations of religious being and belief.

Etymology and history of the concept of "religion"

Etymology

The term religion comes from both Old French and Anglo-Norman and means respect for sense of right, moral obligation, sanctity, what is sacred, reverence for the gods. It is ultimately derived from the Latin word religio. According to Roman philosopher Cicero, religiō comes from relegere: re + lego, where lego is in the sense of 'go over', 'choose', or 'consider carefully'. Contrarily, some modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell have argued that religiō is derived from religare: re + ligare, which was made prominent by St. Augustine following the interpretation given by Lactantius in Divinae institutiones, IV, 28. 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 classic antiquity, religiō broadly meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty to anything. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religiō was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, religiō referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. Religiō was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, or fear, as well as feelings of being bound, restricted, or inhibited. The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus, and some Roman authors related the term superstitio to religiō at times. When religiō came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders. The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious and worldly things were separated, was not used before the 1500s. The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities; the Peace of Augsburg marks such an instance, which has been described by Christian Reus-Smit as "the first step on the road toward a European system of sovereign states."
Roman general Julius Caesar used religiō to mean 'obligation of an oath' when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used the term religiō to describe the apparent respect given by elephants to the night sky. Cicero used religiō as being related to cultum deorum.

In Ancient Greece, the Greek term was loosely translated into Latin as religiō in late antiquity. was sparsely used in classical Greece but became more frequently used in the writings of Josephus in the 1st century CE. It was used in mundane contexts and could mean multiple things from respectful fear to excessive or harmfully distracting practices of others, to cultic practices. It was often contrasted with the Greek word, which meant too much fear.

History of the concept of "religion"

Religion is a modern concept and not a universal concept across history, cultures or languages. The concept was invented recently in the English language and is found in texts from the 17th century due to events such as the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and globalization in the Age of Exploration, which involved contact with numerous foreign cultures with non-European languages. Some argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply the term religion to non-Western cultures, while some followers of various faiths rebuke using the word to describe their own belief system.
The concept of "ancient religion" stems from modern interpretations of a range of practices that conform to a modern concept of religion, influenced by early modern and 19th century Christian discourse. The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even 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, 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, meaning the walk or path sometimes translated as law, which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life. Even though the beliefs and traditions of Judaism are found in the ancient world, ancient Jews saw Jewish identity as being about an ethnic or national identity and did not entail a compulsory belief system or regulated rituals. In the 1st century CE, Josephus had used the Greek term as an ethnic term and was not linked to modern abstract concepts of religion or a set of beliefs. The very concept of "Judaism" was invented by the Christian Church, and it was in the 19th century that Jews began to see their ancestral culture as a religion analogous to Christianity. The Greek word, which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus, is found in the New Testament. is sometimes translated as "religion" in today's translations, but the term was understood as generic "worship" well into the medieval period. In the Quran, the Arabic word is often translated as religion in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed as "law."
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 piety and 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.
Though traditions, sacred texts, and practices have existed throughout time, most cultures did not align with Western conceptions of religion since they did not separate everyday life from the sacred. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and world religions first entered the English language. Native Americans were also thought of as not having religions and also had no word for religion in their languages either. No one self-identified as a Hindu or Buddhist or other similar terms before the 1800s. "Hindu" has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. 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 idea.
According to the philologist Max Müller in the 19th century, the root of the English word religion, the Latin religiō, was originally used to mean only reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety. 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.