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A brief history of religion. (Source)
The dreams of man
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Disturbing your sleep
Recurring dreams

A religion is a systematic set of beliefs, rituals and codifications of behaviour that revolves around a particular group's worldview (views about the world at large and humanity's place in the world). Typically, these beliefs center around some aspect of the supernatural (also often referred to as the "divine"), most often expressed as some form of deity, i.e., one or more gods and goddesses.

To the extent that the system of beliefs and rules is codified, it is called dogma; different religions vary in how much dogma they include and how strictly they define it and enforce it. Religious mythology consists of the stories that develop, largely from oral tradition, to explain and describe the worldview of given religions. Religious beliefs tend to arise from humanity's attempts to explain their world, and where possible, to control it.

As a result, the distinction between a "supernatural religious belief" and superstition tends to be only in the bias of the one applying the label. In other words: "My religion's rituals and beliefs are real, yours are just silly superstition."

Definition and identification[edit]

An infographic exploring the sizes of various religions and religious denominations.
Carl Sagan, The Edge of Forever

Like "beauty" and "porn", it is very easy to recognize a given mainstream Western religion as a religion; the term "religion" was creatoriginated to identify a distinctly Western phenomena. As you move away from Western polytheist and monotheist religions into Eastern religions and some indigenous religions, the line becomes a bit blurred. Theravada Buddhism, for example is sometimes called a religion, other times a philosophy. Some religions have subgroups which are called denominations, such as Shiites and Sunnis.[2]

The following (incomplete) list includes things which academics look for in the attempt to define a set of beliefs and practices as a religion. Of course for every rule, there are exceptions, but in general:

  • Religions have mythologies, often containing supernatural themes.
  • Religions address a person's path in life[3] through rites of passage, with examples including rites of marriage, coming of age, and death (funerary rites). Most religions have some form of rite for those who wish or are pressured to follow the religion more intimately (including priests, healers, monks, nuns, shamans, etc.)
  • Religions generally address, or even attempt to explain the allegedly burning questions about the beginning and ending of the world, even if their answer is "no one knows" or "look to science for answers".
  • Religions often lay out a set of taboos - "things which must not be done ... ever. They are truly unthinkable." These are typically so ingrained with the culture at large, that even in societies where two very different religions exist, the taboos are often the same. Homosexuality might be wrong, or a sin, but cannibalism is taboo.
  • Religions have often defined the calendar, intertwining with the needs of the agrarian, social, or business nature of any individual civilization. At harvest time, for example, many cultures had rites around death and harvest festivals (including praise or even sacrifices to the gods for their bounty). Major weather-events like floods, hurricanes or drought call forth religious ceremonial appeasements (by sacrifice or festival) to gods.


History of religion (including events and dates)[edit]

—Dr. Pascal Boyer, commenting on religions


Some important findings include:

  • 98,000 BCE – Neanderthal burial sites found

The earliest evidence of organized religions begin in the Neolithic era.[5] There is great debate whether religion allows the expansion of social groups from bands to tribes to chiefdom,[6] or if the opposite is true - a set level of social structure is necessary to allow a religion to grow. It is undeniable that virtually every society larger than tribe had a complex religious structure that either empowered the leadership or was itself the governance of the chiefdom.[7] Control of a society appears to have been largely dependent upon control of the religion and the associated worldview.

Important Neolithic religious sites and dates:

  • 3100 BCE – Stonehenge: initial construction begins.

The next major step in the development of religions was writing. With writing came more complex ideas about the world, as well as codification of ethical systems and standardization of the mythology. And with writing came the first holy texts.

Religions with written texts:

  • 3000–2000 BCE – Sumerians and Akkadians in Ancient Mesopotamia
  • 3100–332 BCE – Ancient Egypt
  • 1700–1100 BCE – the Rigveda of Hinduism


Religion in the West[edit]

For the last thousand years, religious lifepractice in the West has predominately involved the Middle Eastern Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the latter two claiming the most followers in recent millennia. These religions have traditionally demanded - at least in theory - that their adherents form a tight and at least somewhat homogeneous bloc, professing or following a non-negotiable set of principles handed down by one or more prophets and/or by the magisterium. When adherents have disagreed on matters of belief or of ceremonial[note 2] detail, it has led to splintering of religions into different denominations and sects.

When the Enlightenment came along sometime in the 17th or 18th centuries and the old theological basis of Christianity came under more rigorous questioning, many within the church responded by emphasizing its social role of caring for the needy and aiming to better the world. This eventually gave rise to the tradition of the Social Gospel (which remains influential today in the mainline Protestant traditions) and to Liberation theology (which operates [sometimes with Vatican disapproval] specially in the Roman Catholic Church).

In the meantime, economists noted that markets created jobs and profits, and postulated the operation of a supernatural Invisible Hand. Capitalists, often loosened from traditional religion by secularised Protestantism, latched onto this new mythology[8] and superstitiously determined that a creator seemed worthy of worship, erecting temples - banks and stock exchanges[9] - and developing the hagiography of captains of industry and of monopolists and the iconography of idols like the Bull[10] (syncretistically adopted from earlier religions like those of Crete[11] or of Mithras[12]) and the Bear,[13], white knights[14] and unicorns.[15]

More recently, with the continued decline of the organized form of some of the Abrahamic religions, many fairly non-religious people have (again) adopted a more individualistic approach to life philosophy, assembling a "personal philosophy" that combines religious, philosophical, and moral concepts that they think or feel works well for them. Others cobble together more explicitly religious ideas and practices along the same lines; this can be labelled variously neopaganism, New Age or cafeteria Christianity depending on the source of the ideas.

Other groups:

  • Atheists
  • those that identify with a particular religion but do not believe in the god
  • those who "worship" non-traditional, apparently non-religious ideas or isms (such as consumerism[16])
  • those who have forgone any overt expression of religion at all

form a growing part of Western culture.

Perhaps as a direct response to the growth in atheism and to the swarms of those who choose to leave formal religion, coupled with a stronger-than-ever reliance on science, a minority (in the US, a very loud, powerful minority) of people have chosen to insert their heads where the sun don't shine and to attempt to ignore this decline, still pretending that "atheism is declining", and insisting that everyone accept every teaching of their religion (and no-one else's) as absolutely true. Such people have become known as fundamentalists - see for example Wahhabism.

Religion in the East[edit]

People in southern Asia have tended to follow various dharmic religions,[17] such as Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Dominant religions in eastern Asia include Buddhism (insofar as it counts as a religion) and Taoism. Western Asia gave birth to the dominant Abrahamic faiths.

Religion and science[edit]

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything




Fundamentalism and science[edit]

In the 1920s, the fundamentalist movement within Christianity became more popular. One of its core tenets presented the Bible as literal truth. This is really the first time any Christian or Jewish denomination stated such a premise – prior to that, most religions and the religious understood that not all things in their holy books were meant to be literal; there were myths, exaggerations for effect, aggrandized history, and poetic symbolism.[18] The basic idea behind the rise of literalism and formal fundamentalism is a growing fear that, as science disproves small details of the Bible such as the confusion of the value of pi, science will erode the "Truth" value of the Bible, and soon people will jump, not from doubting mathematical falsities, but to far more important matters of faith, such as the Divinity of Jesus. This fear that science can and will directly challenge the value of the Bible has led to an effective War on Science, especially culminating in a battle against evolution and increasing rates of atheism.


Examples of science-friendly attitudes within religion[edit]

  • In the Middle Ages, the Muslim world had a renaissance due to their open-mindedness towards science. Indeed, they preserved and expanded upon the knowledge acquired by the ancient Greeks. They, for instance, discovered algebra, which means 'restoration' in Arabic, even though they solved problems verbally rather than symbolically.
  • Several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglican priests, such as William Buckland, Joseph Townsend, William Conybeare, and Adam Sedgwick, made important contributions to modern geology. This came at a time when deep time was still a controversial idea.
  • In the modern era, many Christian denominations accept modern science and its ramifications. In any single situation where science and religion seem to overlap, the idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) attempts to shield believers with plausible anchors for growing cognitive dissonance.
  • The Bahai Faith has a tenet expressly concerning the "unity between science and religion". The tenet doesn't go so far as to claim they are the same thing, but insists one is worthless without the other. According to Baha'is, when science and religion irreconcilably disagree, science wins by default.

Examples of anti-science attitudes within religion[edit]

  • The Roman Catholic Church's 1633 persecution and arrest of Galileo, who harmed nothing but a geocentric worldview (and insulted the Pope in doing so, arguably worsening his position).
  • Opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution, by protestant fundamentalists among his contemporaries and in modern times.

Any religion that requires its followers to accept the Truth of a holy book, religious leader, or set of mythology above "what science says" will necessarily conflict with science. A religion that pushes "faith" over exploration, consideration, thought, and (of course) study, will likely conflict with science, because those methods of reason often lead to an overall skeptical position.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]


  1. Note that religion previously provided answers to questions that today, science explains. "What is thunder?" "Why is there a drought?" See god of the gaps for more on this.


  3. See the Wikipedia article on journey.
  4. The Cave Men of Ice Age Wales
  5. Compare: McMahon, Robin (2011). "10: Diversity and the evolutionary tree of religion". On the Origin of Diversity. Croydon, Surrey: Filament Publishing Ltd. p. 73. ISBN 9781905493876. Retrieved 2017-06-05. "Organised religion traces its roots to the Neolithic revolution, which began 11,000 years ago." 
  6. Compare: McMahon, Robin (2011). "10: Diversity and the evolutionary tree of religion". On the Origin of Diversity. Croydon, Surrey: Filament Publishing Ltd. p. 73. ISBN 9781905493876. Retrieved 2017-06-05. "[...] While bands and small tribes often possess supernatural beliefs, these beliefs do not serve to justify a central authority, justify transfer of wealth or maintain peace between related individuals. Organized religion emerges as a means of providing social and economic stability through justifying the central authority [...]. Organised religion served to provide a bond between unrelated individuals who would otherwise be more prone to enmity. [...] Religions that revolved around moralising gods may have facilitated the rise of large cooperative groups of unrelated individuals." 
  7. Compare: McMahon, Robin (2011). "10: Diversity and the evolutionary tree of religion". On the Origin of Diversity. Croydon, Surrey: Filament Publishing Ltd. p. 73. ISBN 9781905493876. Retrieved 2017-06-05. "Anthropologists have found that virtually all state societies and chiefdoms [...] around the world [...] justify political power through divine authority." 
  8. Nelson, Robert Henry (2010). "1: Tenets of Economic Faith". Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 23. ISBN 9780271038612. Retrieved 2019-02-14. "The Jewish and Christian bibles foretell one outcome of history. If economics foresees another, it is in effect offering a competing religious vision. [...] for many thinkers [...] their belief system results not in a Judeo-Christian heresy, but in an entirely new and seccular religion - although one that draws many of its themes from the biblical tradition, now typically reworking them in a less direct and mostly implicit fashion. [...]" 
  9. Heine, Heinrich (1859) (in German). Sämmtliche Werke. 6 (5 ed.). Philadelphia: John Weik & Company. p. 264. Retrieved 2019-02-14. "Paris, wie Sparta, hat seinen Tempel der Furcht, und das ist die Börse [...]. (Paris, like Sparta, has its temple of Fear, — it is the Bourse.)" 
  10. See the Wikipedia article on Bull market.
  11. See the Wikipedia article on Minoan religion.
  12. See the Wikipedia article on Mithraism.
  13. See the Wikipedia article on Bear Market.
  14. See the Wikipedia article on White knight (business).
  15. See the Wikipedia article on Unicorn (finance).
  16. Nock, Peter (2014). "Introduction - Religion and Industry". Consumerism versus Spirituality (Revised ed.). Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 9780957465718. Retrieved 2017-06-25. "Modern society is regaled with the gospel of consumerism, as distinct from the gospel of salvation, through faith in Christ." 
  17. See the Wikipedia article on Dharmic religion.