ASSORTED DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION:
• “A man’s religion is what he would die for rather than abandon.” (H. Bosanquet) (Meaning: whatever man believes in, he holds firm on to…)
•“A body of samples which impede the free exercise of our faculties” (Salomon Reinach)
•“[T]he feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (William James).
•Religion is the “opium of the people” (Karl Marx).
•“The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence. Religion is the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us ” (F. Schleiermacher 1768-1834).
•“Religion is the quest of life by means of symbols” (Lord Raglan).
•“Religion is morality tinged with emotion” (Mathew Arnold).
•“Religion is a set of beliefs, practices and institutions which men have evolved in various societies” (T. Parsons).
•“Religion is the recognition that all things are manifestations of a power which transcends our knowledge” (Herbert Spencer).
•Human recognition of a superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal God or gods entitled to obedience and worship (Concise Oxford Dictionary).
FIVE DIMENSIONS OF RELIGION:
(1) ritual activities (including, but not only, “church” attendance);
(2) ideology or adherence to the principal beliefs of the religion;
(3) experience or the “feeling” aspect of religion;
(4) the intellectual side of religion, which involved religious “knowledge” and was frequently measured by such activities as reading religious publications (including, but not only, sacred texts);
(5) the consequential dimension, which attempted to measure the “effect” of an individual’s religion in its other dimensions upon his or her “life.”
C. Y. Glock and R. Stark, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)
DOWNLOAD LECTURE NOTES IN PDF: 2 Definitions of Religion
READING: Selvam, S.G. (2013). Towards Religious-Spirituality: A Multidimensional Matrix of Religion and Spirituality