what is religion?

Have you ever wondered why people believe in God (or gods for polytheistic religions) and that he created everything you see out the window? Perhaps the more interesting question is how humans continue to worship their gods in a world of increasing scientific breakthroughs that allow us to bring up topics including the Big Bang Theory and Natural Selection. To understand these ideas, we need to first understand the significance of religion, how it came about, and how different groups created their own religions.

Religion is an essential cultural institution that simply means the belief in a superhuman power(s) that controls the Earth and human life. Religion attempts to answer these 3 questions: How did we get here? Why are we here? What happens when we die? In every single religion, people have faith, or belief in things that can’t be seen and thus proven. For example, Hindus believe that Lord Shiva resides in Mount Kailash. However, not one person has, to this date, climbed Mount Kailash to see Lord Shiva in reality. But do people still worship and believe that Lord Shiva is there watching over them and acknowledging their devotion? Yes! This is faith, and it is this faith that is prevalent in every single religion that you may encounter on this planet. Sometimes, this faith can become so strong that it may be classified as fundamentalism, which is a literal interpretation of a religion’s principles. Fundamentalism promotes a strict compliance with the guidelines set forth by the religion, which could be incorporated into a holy book such as the Quran, and in many religions, failure to follow these guidelines correlates directly to a poor afterlife. When studying religion, there are often 2 views: theology and philosophy. Theology is the study of God and it answers the question: What is God? Philosophy, on the other hand, pertains more to knowledge, learning, and existence. It answers the questions: why are we here? and what is the nature of man? Much like any other broad concept in our studies, religion can be classified in several different ways.

Religion can be classified as either monotheistic or polytheistic. The prefix “mono” means one or single in Greek. Thus, monotheistic religions believe in a single God. The prefix “poly” means “many'' in Greek. Thus, polytheistic religions believe in multiple gods. Religions can also be classified as ethnic religions or universalizing religions. Ethnic religions are limited to a specific ethnic group or regional area. In an ethnic religion, a person is born into the faith and efforts to recruit or apostatize these beliefs are very rare. Examples of ethnic religions that will be further discussed later include Judaism and Hinduism. On the other hand, universalizing religions are much more global in that they can be practiced globally by all people. Members of universalizing religions attempt to convert others. Examples of universalizing religions include Christianity and Islam. Most of the time, universalizing religions have much more followers and are much more widespread than ethnic religions. Although there is no official and accurate count of religious followers, we will be using approximations from the Pew Research Center to bring in quantitative data into our discussion.

As shown in the figure above, Christianity (a universalizing religion) had the most followers as of 2015, with 31.2% of the world’s 7.3 billion people being Christians. Islam (a universalizing religion and the fastest growing religion in the world) has the second-highest number of followers at 24.1% of the global population. Buddhism is the third-largest universalizing religion with 6.9% of the global population. In terms of ethnic religions, Hinduism (largely centered in India) has the largest number of adherents at 15.1% of the global population. Take a closer look at the purple slice in the pie chart. What type of religion is unaffiliated? Well, the true answer to that is that it is not a religion. This group consists of atheists and agnostics. Atheists are people who don’t believe in god or any supernatural entities. Agnostics are quite similar, except they believe that there is no proof that God exists. Although these classifications (monotheistic vs polytheistic & ethnic vs universalizing) exist, we will simplify our study of religion by dividing it into Western and Eastern religions. Let’s start with western religions!