Religion is a very important part of many people’s lives. They devote a lot of time, money and contemplation to it. Some would even die for it. They believe that it can help them get through the dark tunnels of life. It gives them a code of morality that they live by. It makes them choose good over evil, just over unjust and truth over lies. It also teaches them how to deal with problems in their lives.
It can be very difficult to define Religion. There are many different opinions on what it is and how it should be categorized. Some are based on the beliefs of the individuals themselves while others are based on how society perceives it. Some of these ideas are controversial while others are not. It’s hard to find a clear definition of religion because there are so many different views on it.
Some people think that religion should be defined by the things that it does, not what it is. This view is known as a functional definition of religion. They think that the main function of religion is to provide a framework for understanding difficult events in our lives. They believe that if we don’t have a religion to help us understand these events then we may not be able to cope with them.
Other people think that it’s not possible to define religion in terms of what it is or what it does. They think that it is more useful to view it as a social construction. This idea is often associated with Foucauldian or post-colonial theory. They think that the concept of religion is deeply implicated in the history of western statism and imperialism. This is why the only appropriate scholarly stance is one of critique.
The last approach is known as a mixed definition of religion. They want to rule out the definitions that are purely substantive or purely functional and work in the space between them. They say that religion can’t be defined by either what it is or what it does but it has to be both (Schilbrack 2013). In this approach, they stress the relationship between metaphysics and axiology. They argue that religious traditions have prescriptions for living that are rooted in accounts of the nature of the universe. It is impossible to explain these prescriptions without also considering the underlying metaphysics.
Some critics of the monothetic definition of religion have argued that it is anthropocentric to fasten on a single property that puts something in a category. They have urged scholars to avoid this kind of problem by using polythetic approaches that use a prototype structure for concepts rather than a single property. They are used more frequently today because they avoid the claim that an evolving social category has a fixed essence that can be identified by a single property. They are also more likely to capture the full range of properties that make something a religion.