Forging Ahead

John A. Hutchinson, in his book Paths of Faith, acknowledged the difficulty in defining religion. He wrote:

Formal definitions of religion are as numerous, as various, and often as mutually conflicting as there are students of religion. Often such definitions illustrate the oriental parable of the blind men describing the elephant, each taking hold of part of the beast and defining the whole in terms of this part. Like the elephant, religion is a large and complex phenomenon. In this connection, some historians of religion question or reject the word religion as a distortion of the form of experience it seeks to communicate. Several of the world's major languages lack any word that can be adequately translated as "religion." The common noun religion imputes a unity or homogeneity of experience that many observers believe does not exist. (pp. 3-4)

Hutchinson goes on to point out that substituted words do not work. However, he then attempts his own definition of the "ultimate valuation" experience—something at once particularly universal and yet so multifarious and multifaceted that its definition is elusive. The available terminology is inadequate, though, and satisfactory definition eludes even Hutchinson.

Given that we generally recognize and acknowledge that the development of religion is a particularly human endeavor, then we can follow a pattern set by those who simply discuss "religions" without becoming entangled in debates over precise definitions.

Religions include aspects of all of the themes mentioned above.

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What is religion? The question is not easy to answer. As St. Augustine said of time, most of us know perfectly well what religion is - until someone asks us to define it.

The groups, practices and systems that we identify as "religions" are so diverse (not all religions refer to God or gods, not all religions are concerned with morals, not all religions have beliefs about the afterlife...) that it is no easy task to bring them all under one simple definition.

Of course, this difficulty has not stopped people from attempting to define religion. The definitions are quite wide-ranging: some emphasize the personal, others the social; some the beliefs, others the uses; some the structures, others the functions; some the private, others the public; some the mundane, others the transcendent; some the truth, others the illusion. In many cases, a person's definition of religion is actually a definition of his or her own religion.

But while no one definition of religion can completely sum up what religion is, they all tell us something about religion and perhaps bring us closer to an understanding of what we mean when we talk about "religion."

" Religion: A general term used... to designate all concepts concerning the belief in god(s) and goddess(es) as well as other spiritual beings or transcendental ultimate concerns."
— Penguin Dictionary of Religions (1997).

" Religion: Relation of human beings to God or the gods or to whatever they consider sacred or, in some cases, merely supernatural."
— Britannica Concise Encyclopedia (online, 2006)

" Religion: Human beings' relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine."
— Encyclopædia Britannica (online, 2006)

" Religion: (2) a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; (4) a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
— Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (online, 2006)

"The religious response is a response to experience and is coloured by the wish to provide a wider context for a fragile, short and turbulent life."
—Philip Rousseau, The Early Christian Centuries (2002), p. 4.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opiate of the people."
—Karl Marx

"Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being—human or otherwise—i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man."
—Peter Berger

"Viewed systematically, religion can be differentiated from other culturally constituted institutions by virtue only of its reference to superhuman beings. "
—Melford Spiro

"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. "
—A.N. Whitehead

"...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence."
—R.N. Bellah

"Religion is the daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. "
—Ambrose Bierce

"A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
—Emile Durkheim

"One's religion is whatever he is most interested in."
—J.M. Barrie, The Twelve-Pound Look (1910)

"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of."
—Mark Twain

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
—Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

"Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. "
—Napoleon Bonaparte

"We go into religion in order to feel warmer in our hearts, more connected to others, more connected to something greater and to have a sense of peace."
—Goldie Hawn, Beliefnet interview

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
—Bertrand Russell

"Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience."
—George Santayana

"Religion is all bunk. "
— Thomas Edison

"To be religious is to have one's attention fixed on God and on one's neighbour in relation to God."
—C.S. Lewis, "Lilies that Fester" in The Twentieth Century (April 1955).

"Pure religion and undefiled before God the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
—James 1:27, New Testament

"Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Religion itself is nothing else but Love to God and Man. He that lives in Love lives in God, says the Beloved Disciple: And to be sure a Man can live no where better."
—William Penn

"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life."
—William James

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; Unbelief, in denying them."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson