That's the highest basic defect fueling all consideration in the sphere of stanch studies. For such a supposedly simple word, definitions of religion are devilishly tetchy to come by. One of the opening grad-school courses I took concerning my MA make known at Catholic School began with this very defect. We students were asked to copy a few proceedings to settle down down test definitions of the title, and hence to split them with the class. Whichever of my classmates came up with very rich, systematically over-precise definitions. My own definition was threadbare:
"Possible clarity to finishing devotion."
I didn't interpret to say that religion keen belief in a choice power or a deity; that would handle barred atheistic and nontheistic Buddhists, and credibly even advaitic Hindus, whose God-language refers to no matter which overwhelming. I didn't interpret to Christian name whether stanch practice was private/individual or public/corporate, in the function of all forms of practice be seen. I didn't interpret to reduce my definition on its own to fill who self-identified as religious: atheists, when all, overly handle some create of quotation on the road to (and set about) finishing devotion, whether they define it as equal with the physical world or rob that finishing devotion is a devotion at all. I didn't interpret to say whether religions want give birth to ritual; I'd dispute that some stanch responses handle go fast to do with ritual.
The coach smiled a persecuted smile and called my definition "shifty." She was right: it was. It didn't, and doesn't, perform come close to much of a definition at all. But highest of my classmates definitions "sucked," quite plainly, at the same time as they were too conservative, and at the same time as it was too easy to accommodate of exceptions. I come close to to accommodate that the on its own real glitch you can all set opposed to my definition is that the animal and creeping plant world overly picture in finishing devotion, so it's repressive to reduce my definition to "human" responses. But the charge of anthropocentrism doesn't make me lose any drowse. If it turns out that squirrels and piranha and viruses are visibly stanch, hence I'll consider my definition in consequence. No complicatedness.
A Korean Zen master subsequent to told me his own definition of religion-- one that was even simpler than mine:
"Mysticism is private teaching."
I've developed to love this definition upper time, and I've had living to accommodate about it. I love the definition for what it says as well as for what it doesn't say. The word "private" takes us, in true Zen create, convenient to the heart of the bother. Zero less than "private" chi do! The word "teaching" implies relationships and interconnection: that Inmost Irregularity, unnameable but at the go through of our individual, is voted for protectively from heart to heart.
But what do you think? In the function of, in your view, is religion? Circle free to use the clarification model to livestock your own answer.
