DEFINING THE UNDEFINABLE
This is a series that defines comprehensively and objectively difficult-to-define words and the concepts they represent.

Part 1

WHAT IS RELIGION?

Religions are emotional attempts to placate anxiety about human mortality or to provide existential consolation through a tenacious adherence or loyalty to a set of cultural beliefs, rituals and communal behaviour, to be defended at all costs. Their central ideas are focused either on an unalterable fundamental principle or varying concepts of a supreme supernatural being or beings that have absolute control over human destiny. Characteristically, such ideas are neither grounded in reason nor reality, so a scientific or logical evaluation of religion is not possible.