Religion is a concept that is used to describe the beliefs and practices that people have about things, ideas, and events in the world. It is a social concept that has been around for centuries, and it has taken on a wide variety of meanings across cultures.
Among those who use religion as a term, the meanings of the word vary widely and the concept itself is often contested. This makes it important to understand the concepts that underlie the words and what they mean in practice.
The History of the Concept
Historically, religion has been used as a concept to define scrupulous devotion to particular ideas, concepts, or people. It was also used as a concept to refer to certain types of social practice, such as religions that endorsed specific rituals or ceremonies. The complexities of the definition of religion have shifted as well, with cosmic versions of the concept and functional definitions retooling the term into new, more inclusive senses.
The Definition of Religion
As with many abstract concepts used to sort cultural types, the concept of religion has posed two philosophical challenges for the academic study of religions: how to define it in terms of necessary and sufficient properties and whether it can be said to have an essence.
In the first case, the problem arises because of a disparate variety of social practices now called religion that are not counted by most definitions of religion, making it difficult to assess the meaning and utility of the term. This has led some to argue that one should treat the concept of religion as a family resemblance concept, which means that it should be treated as a phenotype or taxon with only a resemblance to other types of phenotypes.
The second problem that can arise with the concept of religion is that it can be used to identify a number of different kinds of social reality, and it has been claimed that this can lead to an ethnocentricity. Nevertheless, this can be avoided when the conceptual analysis of the evolution of social kinds is based on an understanding of the properties that characterize these phenotypes, rather than on a pre-existing set of features that is reflected in a definition of this concept.
Polythetic Approaches to the Definition of Religion
There is a growing interest in the polythetic approach, which is based on an understanding of how human societies and cultures develop over time as they adapt to change. This is particularly true for the way that language develops and evolves, and it has been applied to studying social concepts such as religion.
This type of analysis is particularly helpful in the case of a social genus like religion because it helps to clarify what properties are most essential to the emergence of that genus and what characteristics are most typical of members of that genus, without having to identify a single property as being essential or exemplary for all members of the genus. It can also help to determine the threshold number of properties that a member of a given class must have in order to be considered a religion, and then it can be easier to recognize patterns within that class.