How to Define Religion
Religious belief is an important part of the worldview of most people. It has influenced culture in many ways. Among other things, it has led to feasts, songs and poetry, art, dress codes, rituals, and rules for social life and interaction. It has also had a strong influence on history, politics and war. It has often been influential on the development of cosmological orders and philosophies, societal structures, laws, beliefs about the afterlife and supernatural beings, and even physical alterations to the body, such as male circumcision.
Nevertheless, many academics have found it difficult to define religion in any way that is widely accepted. This is because the concept of a religion has been through several phases in its evolution. The original sense of the word was that of a scrupulous devotion to a deity or group of gods. A second sense, inherited from the Latin religio, was that of a set of cultural types characterized by certain beliefs and behaviors. A third sense was that of a group of practices that united a community into a moral order, without requiring belief in any unusual realities.
Moreover, many academics are aware that the term religion is a social construct. As a result, they have attempted to understand how and why this concept has emerged. One approach has been to develop stipulative definitions of religion, which are not assessed by their truth value but rather by their usefulness for various purposes.