Religion is an important factor in the life of most people. It provides them with morality, a belief in an afterlife and often a sense of purpose. It also helps them navigate challenging circumstances in their lives. Many studies have shown that religious people tend to be healthier and live longer than those who are secular.

The definition of a religion that is most commonly used is the one that consists of beliefs, practices and experiences that are considered sacred by a group of individuals. It includes ritual, morality and a transcendent goal of perfection or closeness to God.

Man is unable to acquire knowledge of the fundamentals of religion through his independent exercise of reason or intuition, but he comes to know them through authoritative teaching, especially the authority of parents and elders, as well as the practice of religious rites and customs. These teachings are regarded as so important to life that to reject them would be a sin against decency and good order.

The higher religions are concerned with a love of God for His own sake, and in this love there is the desire of attaining His excellences of beauty, goodness and truth. In these religions, there is the fear of God’s power and wisdom, resulting in feelings of awe. This is accompanied by the awareness of offending Him and deserving His punishments, and hence an anxious desire of reconciliation.

Historically, most attempts to study religion have been “monothetic,” following the classical view that every instance of a given concept will share the same defining property that puts it in that category (for examples see the articles on ice-skating and the history of science). The last several decades have seen a movement towards a more polythetic approach, which treats the term Religion as an abstract social taxon, sortable by its family resemblance properties.