Religion is a massively important part of many people’s lives. It can help them with their spirituality and guide them through the difficult times in life. It can also help them to live a moral and ethical life. Religions can also have a positive impact on society, for example by encouraging charity work and social services. Religion can also have a negative effect on society, for example by encouraging intolerance and violence towards other religions or by promoting discrimination.
The vast and varied ways in which people have organized their beliefs about the world around them, both in terms of how they understand the universe and the place of human beings within it, is at the heart of religion. This is why there are so many different types of religions.
Different academic approaches to the study of religion have developed over time. One of the most influential was the French approach called histoire des mentalités (see below), which prepared the way for more modern developments in the study of religion.
For some scholars, the term’religion’ has been defined as whatever makes up a person’s dominant concerns (which may or may not involve belief in any unusual realities). Others, like Durkheim, have sought to give a more scientific explanation of why this happens. A number of sociobiologists, including Dawkins, have argued that it is simply the result of natural selection, with religions serving the function of providing orientation toward the moral.