Proposed Definitions of Religion

• Action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please a divine ruling power, the exercise or practice of rites or observances implying this … a particular system of faith worship (Oxford English Dictionary).
• A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them (Emil Durkheim).
• The 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 for you at one time a way of thinking, a faith, a peculiar way of contemplating the world, and of combining what meets us in the world: at another, it is a way of acting, a peculiar desire and love, a special kind of conduct and character (Friedrich Schleiermacher).
• The sacred is mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Rudolph Otto).
• Add idea of inner enlightenment or mysticism to Otto's definition (Ninian Smart).
• The term “religion” is meant to be neutral and apply to all cases, leaving out a faith commitment in the method of study. However, it still imports a host of assumptions that can distort the object of study; chief among them the assumption that “religion” is about human responses to the divine (Timothy Fitzgerald).
• A religion is a dynamic cultural complex with positive or negative impact that stakes a claim to legitimacy based on a foundational connection to reports of hierophany. (Victoria Kennick Urubshurow)
• Religion alone confronts the individual with the most momentous option this world can present. It calls the soul to the highest adventure it can undertake, a proposed journey across the jungles, peaks, and deserts of the human spirit (Huston Smith).

Necessary components of religion:

• adherents
• beliefs
• practices
• some concept of a reality or realities beyond ordinary human experience

Sacred and profane

• sacred time (Ramadan in Jerusalem's Old City)
• sacred space (Uluru [Ayers Rock])
• sacred symbols & artifacts (Tibetan Sand Mandala)
• sacred interactions (Elevating the host in a Roman Catholic mass)
• sacred personages (Krishna)
• sacred metatime/metaspace (Dante among the Falsifiers in Hell, by Gustave Doré)