The word religion has long been used to describe an organization that protects and transmits the means of attaining important goals. Those goals, in turn, may be either proximate (a wiser, more fruitful, charitable, or successful way of life) or ultimate, and have to do with the final condition of this or any other person, or of the cosmos.
In most, if not all cultures, one finds beliefs about the supernatural and the existence of God or other deities. These beliefs are usually codified into prayer, ritual, scriptures, and religious law. Most religions also provide moral codes that outline a person’s obligations towards themselves, other believers, outsiders, and the supernatural world. In addition, religions often divide the world into two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane. People act religiously – or, in Latin, “religio” – in a variety of ways: scrupulously, devotedly, generously, ecstatically, puritanically, superstitiously, and so on.
Most attempts to analyse religion, in the past, have been “monothetic”, assuming that every case of religion can be accurately described by some defining property or properties. However, recent decades have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches to understanding religion. Polythetic analysis abandons the classical view that a concept must have exactly one defining feature, and instead treats each occurrence of the concept as possessing a number of overlapping but distinct properties. This approach allows us to discover surprising patterns and the co-appearance of properties that lead to explanatory theories of religion.