The Encyclopedia of World Religions

378 S religion, definition of

to define religion as those ideas and practices that have to do with belief in God, gods, or spirits. Oth ers, however, have contended that some Eastern examples of the sort of practices that “look like” religion, such as Confucian RITUALS or even Bud dhist MEDITATION , do not necessarily involve the Western concept of God. They have therefore expanded the idea to anything that gives one a sense of awe, wonder, or of connectedness to the universe: Friedrich Schleiermacher called it that which produces feelings of dependence on some thing greater than oneself. Rudolf O TTO saw as the ground of religion a sense of a reality tremendous, yet fascinating and “wholly other”; this could be the Buddhist NIRVANA as well as God. Paul Tillich said religion is the state of being grasped by one’s “ultimate concern.” Others have preferred a definition based more on religion’s social or ritual role. Émile D URKHEIM saw religion mainly in “totems,” festivals, dances, and other symbols or practices that both repre sented and created the unity of a tribe or society. Mircea E LIADE made fundamental to religion the experience of “sacred space” and “sacred time,” that is, places and occasions that are separate, “nonhomogeneous,” demarcated off from the ordi nary or “profane” world. He recognized, however, that these can be interior as well as out there; the experiences of PRAYER or meditation can make for an inward sacred space and time even in the midst of everyday life. Perhaps it must be acknowledged that any definition of religion can only be fairly complex. It might be possible to start with the idea that religion does, in fact, need to deal in some way with what ever is seen as ultimate, unconditioned reality, call it God, Nirvana, or even the absolutely ideal social order. Then one could take into account the three forms of religious expression as put forward by the sociologist of religion, Joachim Wach. These are: the theoretical, that is, the beliefs and stories of a tradition having to do with ultimate reality or its manifestation in gods and revelations and the like, answering to the question “What do they say?”; the “practical,” practices or forms of WORSHIP with the same object, answering to the question

structures known as STUPAS to house relics of the BUDDHA . Similarly, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) required ALTARS in all Christian churches to contain relics. Buddhists have tended to venerate parts of the Buddha’s cremated body. A particularly important part has been the Buddha’s tooth housed in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Whoever owned it ruled the country Christians have venerated relics of the saints, the Virgin M ARY , and J ESUS . Christian relics were espe cially common in the Middle Ages. With the high demand for relics, unscrupu lous people have traded in fakes. The pious have also made honest mistakes. An example of the lat ter is the Shroud of Turin. Tradition said Jesus was buried in it. Some scientific tests date it to the late medieval period. religion, definition of Explaining what religion is. Religion is one of those words people tend to feel they know the meaning of until it comes to providing a precise definition that covers all cases of what one wants to call religion, excluding every thing else. Then it can be surprisingly difficult to define—first of all, because religion embraces so much. Religion can range from one’s innermost and subtlest feelings to large and powerful institutions that can seem as much political as religious, to folk customs that appear on the borderline between religion and culture. Many traditional societies, in fact, do not clearly distinguish between religion and the social order or popular culture; indeed, the religion scholar W. Cantwell Smith has argued that the notion most of us have of a religion as a sepa rate, detachable area of human life apart from the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres is a quite modern idea that would be meaningless to many people in the Middle Ages and before. At the same time, attempts at definition can and have been made. Some people, especially in the Christian West, from Enlightenment Deists (believers in G OD but not in “supernatural” reli gion) like Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire, to the pioneer anthropologist E. B. Tylor, have wanted