Religion is a system of beliefs and practices that aim to guide people to success and prosperity in this life and the next. Religion can also be the source of peace and harmony among the people. But when religion becomes a cause of dissension and strife, it is not doing its job properly. Religion should help to spread peace and harmony in the world, and help all nations develop. It should help to provide justice for everyone and eradicate greed, hatred, and racial arrogance.
In the past, scholars of religion have primarily offered three kinds of definitions: a substantive definition that determines membership in the category by the presence of a belief in a distinctive kind of reality; a functional definition (for example, as the set of beliefs and practices that unite a group into a moral community), and a more-or-less descriptive definition, such as Emile Durkheim’s concept of religion as “whatever system of beliefs and practices makes possible for human beings to recognize themselves in the face of the Other and gives them a purpose in life”.
As late 19th century sociologists moved away from metaphysical schemes that were directly in competition with Christian theologies, they opened the door for an academic study of religion that is based on a dialectical framework. The idea was that by comparing the various systems of belief and ritual behavior that existed on earth, it would be possible to find a common element.
The first step in this dialectical process was to move beyond a normative assessment of different religions and to start studying them phenomenologically. The result was a remarkably rich comparative study of religions.
But this comparison began in a particular cultural milieu, and it is important to acknowledge that this will always color the results. For this reason, it is helpful to think of the study of religion as a multicultural endeavor.
One of the challenges is to keep in mind that different cultures have very different ways of thinking about and describing religion, even though there are some basic similarities between them. The resulting diversity can be frustrating, but it is also fascinating. Another challenge is to avoid the trap of seeing this variety as “religious” or not religious. If religion is simply a social genus that includes a wide range of ways to organize human behavior, then all these forms can be studied and compared without prejudice.