What is Religion?

The word "religion" can be defined in many ways but usually it involves one or more of the following three things:

1. the worship of a God or gods
2. guidelines about how to behave
3. answers to life's biggest questions

Since science also seeks to provide answers to life's biggest questions, it sometimes comes into conflict with religion. Therefore, some people believe that we must choose between the two. However, others believe that science and religion can both be useful (since science tends to answer the question HOW and religion tends to answer the question WHY). What is your opinion about this?

Early religion

The earliest kind of religion to develop was animism. It developed while humans were living as hunter-gatherers and is still found among indigenous people today. Animists believe that humans and animals (and sometimes even plants and rocks) have a soul or spirit. The word animism, animal and animation all come from the same root -- all are related to the idea of a force that makes something move or "come alive". Spirits were assumed to be responsible for things that happened in nature (such as the weather).

Over time, many things in nature became more and more personified until they were eventually thought of as being gods and given specific names. Animism therefore became polytheism (belief in many gods). The first human civilizations followed different types of polytheism -- such as the Egyptians along the Nile or the Babylonians along the Euphrates & Tigris.

However, another group of ancient polytheists would become more important in the history of religion -- the Indo-Europeans. From their original home near the Caspian Sea, they split into several groups -- some settling in Europe and others in Iran and India. The groups in India integrated with the people already living there and played a role in the development of Hinduism. One of the groups that settled in Europe became the ancient Greeks. We can therefore see certain similarities between Greek and Hindu gods.

In ancient polytheism, there was always a Sky Father and an Earth Mother. According to the Indo-Europeans, the name of the Sky Father was Dyaus. This word eventually evolved into "Zeus" (the main god of the ancient Greeks) and can still be seen in words like "Dieu" (t
he French word for God).

Although Hinduism today still seems like polytheism, it is actually closer to something called pantheism (belief that everything is part of one god). Many other new religions also developed out of early Hinduism, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. These religions are collectively known as Indian or "Dharmic" religions. We look at Hinduism and Buddhism in more detail on another day.

Religion in the West

Meanwhile, in another part of the world the ancient Jewish people started following monotheism (belief in only one god). The part of the Christian bible, known as the Old Testament tells the story of the Jewish people and their beliefs. Some famous Old Testament characters include Adam (the 1^st man), Noah (who build a boat and saved the animals), Abraham (father of the Jewish people), Moses (Who led them out of Egypt), and David (the famous kind who defeated the giant goliath).  Many English names today are based on Bible characters like these.

At the same time as the Jews developed their monotheism, many Greeks thinkers were moving away from belief in god’s altogether and developing, philosophy and science instead. This later paced the way for agnosticism (uncertainly about God or Gods) and atheism (belief in no gods).

Then, about 2,000 years ago, a Jewish teacher named Jesus died and some of his followers claimed that he was raised from the dead. These followers eventually became known as Christians. However, because the culture of that time was dominant by Greek thinking Christianity (and most of the western thought in general) developed out a combination of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy.

In about 600 AD, an Arab named Mohammad claimed to have received words directly from God and wrote them down in the Qur’an, He convinced the Arabic people to accept monotheism (like the Jews and Christians) and eventually this gave rise to Islam

In summary, we can see that all the major religions share common roots:

We can therefore divide the main religions in the world today into two main types,  which have several key differences between them: