When I was reading up on religion two posts ago (“What is Religion”), I came across a statement that I knew from my personal experience with religion and belief to be true, but I had never before come across it in print. This is what I read in Wikipedia.org under “religion”:
Many languages have words that can be translated as “religion”, but they may use them in a very different way, and some have no word for religion at all. For example, the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as “religion”, also means law. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through pietyand ceremonial as well as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at first had a similar union between “imperial law” and universal or “Buddha law”, but these later became independent sources of power.[13][14]
There is no precise equivalent of “religion” in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities.[15] One of its central concepts is “halakha“, sometimes translated as “law””, which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life.
What I find interesting here is that historically religion was a law – a description of the reality of the world. Just like we have physical laws that describe the reality of relationships between elements, the old historical religion was a law that described the reality of relationships between people and of people to their world around them. It was inseparable from the physical reality; it included it. It has only been in the last century or two, that the concept of personal belief has been developed. It is so persistent right now, particularly in the western world, that it is even hard to explain the historical fact that I find in evidence – that religion in its original state is a description of reality – the relationships of “spirit” (invisible matter) as well as physical matter.
Art and the Invisible 