About religion and such¶
What do we mean when we say “religion”? Just to illustrate the complexity of the topic, Wikipedia has a separate article just about the definition of religion. I don’t know any other word that has a separate article for its definition.
Wikipedia also has a separate table of contents for articles about “religion and such”: Religion and belief systems. The title of this TOC tells us that “religions” and “belief systems” are similar concepts.
My definitions¶
Sometimes I really suffer when I see how a same word is being used to designate different concepts, or multiple words being used to designate a single concept. As a software developer I want to work with clear definitions. See About names and languages.
On this page I’ll try to make things clear at least for myself. Rather than trying to cover everything that has been said about these words and these concepts, I just try to define a vocabulary for myself and for those who try to understand what I’m talking about.
So here are some definitions that work for me.
Individual versus collective¶
One of my challenges was to differentiate between individual and the collective definitions.
Level |
How it shows up |
Where it is stored |
Old word |
Modern word |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Individual |
||||
Collective |
- religion¶
A culture that formulates its knowledge using a Holy Scripture and other teachings in order to cultivate them.
A social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, world views, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. –Wikipedia
- culture¶
A set of traditions, conventions and habits shared by a group of humans. Any given culture implies and cultivates a given set of values and convictions.
A set of ideals that makes a group of humans cooperate efficiently by creating “artificial instincts”, which accustom individuals “to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules”. –Yumal Harari, Sapiens, p.163 (adapted)
- belief system¶
A structured set of principles or tenets held to be true by an individual or larger group. It can contain aspects such as morality, life purpose, or empirical reality (Uso-Domenech & Nescolarde-Selva, 2016). (via https://helpfulprofessor.com/belief-systems)
- Holy Scripture¶
A document that is used by a religion as the base for their teachings.
- faith¶
The set of convictions of an individual human. The sum of beliefs you rely on, the result of what you have learned during your personal history.
Every human has faith, it’s also called inner voice or world view.
- world view¶
The way an individual or group thinks about and interprets the world around them. –Open Education Sociology Dictionary
The fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual’s or society’s knowledge and point of view. –Wikipedia
A comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint. Called also weltanschauung. –Merriam-Webster
- inner voice¶
The “voice” within you that tells you intuitively how to decide in a given situation.
- heart¶
The parts of our body where our faith is stored.
This is your brain and other parts of your body, including very unconscious parts.
- faith culture¶
A culture based on a given set of answers to a set of faith questions. This can be a formal religion or a less formal culture.
- faith question¶
A question for which there is no scientifically valid answer and which therefore can have controversial answers.
- faith statement¶
A reproducible answer to a faith question. Where “reproducible” means that has been formulated in some way and is used for identification.
Religion as a social phenomenon is the fruit of our longing for an ultimate truth.
A religion gives me a language that I can use to communicate more efficiently about faith questions.
Buddhism is a religion because it is a comprehensive world view and has holy scriptures.
Marketism is a comprehensive world view with spiritual components, but has no Holy Scripture.
Football is a culture, but not a religion because it isn’t comprehensive (doesn’t embrace all aspects of life) and has no Holy Scripture.
“Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law (…).” – Pope Benedict XVI speaking to the German Bundestag, Berlin, 22 September 2011