Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the Universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions in the world.
Many religions may have organized behaviors, clergy, a definition of what constitutes adherence or membership, holy places, and scriptures. The practice of a religion may also include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration of a god, gods or goddesses, sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trance, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service or other aspects of human culture. Religions may also contain mythology.
The word religion is sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system; however, in the words of Émile Durkheim, religion differs from private belief in that it is "something eminently social". A global 2012 poll reports that 59% of the world's population is religious, 23% are not religious, and 13% are atheists.
Read more about Religion: Etymology, Definitions, Origins and Development, Religious Groups, Secularism and Irreligion, Criticism
Other articles related to "religion, religions":
... Court ruling When we think of the Hindu religion, unlike other religions in the world, the Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet it does not worship any ... Thus some scholars argue that the Hinduism is not a religion per se but rather a reification of a diverse set of traditions and practices by scholars who constituted a unified system and arbitrarily ... also have been necessitated by the desire to distinguish between "Hindus" and followers of other religions during the periodic census undertaken by the colonial British ...
... as a distinct group, and it was their attitude to religion that distinguished the left and right from then onwards (August Cieszkowski is a possible exception to this rule) ... Wilhelm III, under the influence of his relatively enlightened minister of religion, health and education Altenstein, allowed pretty much anything to be said about religion so long as there was ... Thus the Young Hegelians at first found it easier to direct their critical energies towards religion than politics ...
... Main article Criticism of religion Religious criticism has a long history, going back at least as far as the 5th century BCE ... During the Middle Ages, potential critics of religion were persecuted and largely forced to remain silent ... century with the Enlightenment, thinkers like David Hume and Voltaire criticized religion ...
... Main article Religion in the Middle East The Middle East is very diverse when it comes to religions, many of which originated there ... Islam in its many forms is by far the largest religion in the Middle East, but other faiths that originated there, such as Judaism and Christianity, are also well ... There are also important minority religions like Bahá'í, Yazdânism, Zoroastrianism, Mandeanism, Druze, Yarsan, Yazidism and Shabakism, and in ancient times the region was home to ...
... Religion in Saarland - 2007 religion percent Roman Catholics 64.1% Protestants 19.5% Other or none 22.0% The Saarlanders are the most ...
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“One’s religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success.”
—J.M. (James Matthew)