Some Definitions of Religion

Some Definitions and/or Assessments of Religion

Tylor: “…belief in spiritual beings.”

Durkheim: … “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 one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.”

Spiro: “An institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.”

Robertson: “…pertains to a distinction between the empirical and a super-empirical transcendent reality… action shaped by an acknowledgement of the empirical/super-empirical distinction.”

Horton: “An extension of the field of people’s social relationships beyond the confines of a purely human society… one in which human beings involved see themselves in a dependent position vis-à-vis their non-human alters…”

Yinger: “Religion is a system of beliefs ad practices by means of which a group of people struggle with the ultimate problem of human life.”

James: Religion “is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. . . . (Relgion) is “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

Müller: “an effort to conceive the inconceivable and to express the inexpressible, an aspiration toward the infinite.”

Maritneau: “Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.”

Schleiermacher: “the essence of religion consists in the feeling of absolute dependence.”

Otto: “Religion is that which grows out of, and gives expression to, experience of the holy in its various aspects.”

Whitehead: “Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.”

Dewey: “The religious is any activity pursued on behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.”

Tillich: “Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life.”

Freud: “Religion is “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father.”

Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… a protest against real suffering… it is the opium of the people… the illusory sun which revolves around man for as long as he does not evolve around himself.”

Geertz: “Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality tat the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

Livingston: “Religion is that system of activities and beliefs directed toward that which is perceived to be of sacred value and transforming power.”

Swidler: “…an explanation of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly.”

Feuerbach: “Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, being out of ourselves.”

Hick: “Religion constitutes our varied human response to transcendent Reality.”

Hobbes: “To say that [God] hath spoken to [someone] in a dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him!”

Wilson: “Religions are analogous to superorganisms. They have a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they reproduce, and, in the fullness of time, most die. In each of these phases religions reflect the human organisms that nourish them. They express the primary rule of human existence, that whatever is necessary to sustain life is ultimately biological.”

Réveille: “Religion is the determination of human life by the sense of a bond joining the human mind with the mysterious mind whose domination of the world and of itself it recognizes, and with which it takes pleasure in feeling joined.”

Mueller: “… an effort to conceive the inconceivable and to express the inexpressible, an aspiration toward the infinite.”

Spencer: “. . . the belief in the omnipresence of something that goes beyond the intellect.”

Tweed:“Religions are confluences of organic cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries”

Stark and Finke: “Religion is concerned with the supernatural; everything else is secondary . . . . Religion consists of very general explanations of existence, including terms of exchange with a god or gods.”

J.Z. Smith: Religion is “a system of beliefs and practices that are relative to superhuman beings.”

D. Barrett: “A social construct encompassing beliefs and practices which enable people, individually and collectively, to make some sense of the Great Questions of life and death.”

Nelkin: “a belief system that includes the idea of the existence of 'an eternal principle ... that has created the world, that governs it, that controls its destinies or that intervenes in the natural course of its history”

Kant: is (subjectively regarded) the recognition of all duties as divine commands . . . The one true religion comprises nothing but laws, that is, those practical principles of whose unconditioned necessity we can become aware, and which we therefore recognize as revealed through pure reason (not empirically). I take the following proposition to be a principle requiring no proof: Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious illusion and pseudo-service of God.

Mudimbe: “Let us accept that any religion, its rituals and theatricality as perceptual phenomena. . . . It would include naturalism, that is, an explicit will to integrate one spiritually in the cosmic order; fetishism, or the desire to transcend and manipulate the culturally and conventionally separated orders of the sacred and the profane; and finally, a cult of ancestors, or a cult of sanctified models offered to a community as concrete and living examples of ‘political’ perfection.”

Bible: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

Berger: “Religion has played a strategic part in the human enterprise of world-building . . . Religion implies that human order is projected into the totality of being. Put differently, religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.”

To be continued…