Religion can be broken down into three main sections – spirituality, faith and practices. Firstly, spirituality is the spiritual quality that someone possesses. Faith is the reliance or trust in a particular belief and religious practices are actions or a life style showing dedication to a particular belief or set of beliefs. For example, going to church.
These three things make up the basis for religion. The definition of religion also depends on how you percieve it. A person looking at a religion from an outside perspective would see it in a completely different way compared to someone who was, for example, a Christian, and actively religious.
Religion is studied and analysed from many different angles. For example, an anthropologist would define religion based on how it affected society and customs, whereas a psychologist would examine how a religion affected the way a person thought and behaved. Another viewpoint would be a theologist, who would analyse religion from the inside, as would a phenominologist.
A person could define religion as either constructive or destructive. One example of the constructive nature of religion is that it brings people together. But, another person could define religion as destructive on the basis that it causes wars – Ireland, for example, where two different people have contrasting beliefs – one being fundementalist.
A scientist might define religion based on facts and figures, religion’s place in society and compared to science.
A person may follow a religion such as Judaism, which believes in and worships a God, and may believe that Budhaism is not a religion because it doesn’t. Followers of these two religions would have very different ideas if asked to define religion.
In conclusion, because religion has so many elements and there are so many ways of examining each one, it is near impossible to define religion, incorporating everyone’s point of view.