What is religion?

Dear reader,

As I started thinking about how to explain the connection between art and religion, I found myself wanting in information and particular examples. And as I started researching, I realized, not for the first time on this blog, that the subject is much deeper and requires more than a single blog entry.

Let’s start with a simple question: “What is religion?” The dictionary defines it as: 1) the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods, 2) a particular system of faith and worship.  Wikipedia says the following: “Religion is an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.^{[note 1]} Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the Universe.” It also adds the definitions of many scholars which include belief in supernatural beings – which exists in every known society; and outline religion as the creator of moods and motivations in a person, or at least explain religion as existing because of a deeper motive in a person.

An extremely interesting article on this subject I read in National Geographic magazine on the cover of the June 2011 issue – “The Birth of Religion”. The discovery of the ancient temple site described there has made anthropologists reconsider their theory about the development of civilization – instead of coming from agriculture, much new-found evidence suggests that religion – i.e. actions and symbols of  communication with spiritual beings – was the foundation of civilization. I see these carved images and architectural stone arrangements as the beginning of our contemporary arts (and not only of the arts, of course), and they came about because people were interacting with real invisible forces and/or personalities – because that’s what spiritual beings really are – something real yet invisible to the eyes. We are used to modern science, which considers real only what can be detected with a microscope or other scientific tools, but those people in their mind were building this stunning site for a real definite purpose. To them, to go the distance in building all of that, it carried purpose to the very core of their existence.