For many people, particularly those in Western, Christian cultures, religion is equated with belief. Religious beliefs, which are held to be true and not to be challenged or questioned, provide the framework through which the people view the world. Religious beliefs provide explanations about the meaning of life. Many religions, but not all, place emphasis on belief.
According to Carole Hill, in the introduction to Symbols and Society: Essays on Belief Systems in Action:
“A belief system is concerned with the schemes people construct to make sense out of their experiences and to order the universe.”
Medford Spiro, in his chapter on defining religion in
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, puts it this way:
“Every religious system consists, in the first instance, of a cognitive system; i.e. it consists of a set of explicit and implicit prepositions concerning the superhuman world and man’s relationship to it, which it claims to be true.”
Note that in this belief system all of its propositions are presumed to be true. With regard to the truth of religious beliefs, i.e. creed, Medford Spiro writes:
“Most theorists seem to agree that religious statements are believed to be true because religious actors have had social experiences which, corresponding to these beliefs, provide them with face validity.”
While all religions appear to have foundation beliefs, the importance of these beliefs may vary greatly. In some religions, such as many of the Protestant Christian groups, belief is extremely important, while in tribal religions, such as the traditional Native American traditions, belief is not important. Karen Armstrong in her examination of the beginnings of the great religious traditions
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions reports:
“Indeed, it is common to call religious people ‘believers,’ as though asserting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics.”
She goes on to say:
“What mattered was not what you believed but how you believed.”
In pointing out that religion is more than just belief, British social anthropologist Raymond Firth, in his book
Elements of Social Organization, writes:
“Belief along does not constitute religion; the rites and mundane practices associated with belief are an essential constituent of the whole.”
In looking at language and religion in
A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Webb Keane writes:
“Many religious traditions have little interest in either individual belief or public statements of doctrine and may accept differences of interpretation as long as practices themselves remain consistent.”
The emphasis on belief in some religions has resulted with religion itself being defined on the basis of key beliefs of certain religions. Thus, it is not uncommon for Protestant Christians to define religion in such a way that it requires the belief in a god or higher power, a belief in salvation, and a belief in some kind of life after death. Protestant missionaries, therefore, working among the aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia had had to conclude that these people had no religion. Similarly, many vehemently deny that Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and other religions are “real” religions because their belief systems do no emphasize the things that are important to Christianity. In an article in
Free Inquiry, Eugenie C. Scott writes:
“It turns out to be quite difficult to define religion in a way that includes world religions like Christianity and Buddhism as well as tribal and other local religions. The definition that I use as an anthropologist is that religion is the set of beliefs and practices that link people with a nonmaterial reality that is perceived differently from culture to culture.”
One of the classic definitions of religion, offered by Clifford Geertz in
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion sees religion as:
“(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”
With regard to this definition, Barbara King, in her book
Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, notes:
“Nowhere does he mention faith, belief, God, gods, spirits, eternal life, souls, or sacred texts.”
Ultimately, religious beliefs are a filter through which people see and interpret the natural and social world. As knowledge of the natural world grows and changes, religious beliefs should also change. However, religions which are based on written texts often find it difficult to change or modify beliefs to stay in harmony with actual knowledge. For example, there are some Christians who have used the genealogies in the Bible as absolute facts for calculating the date of creation and therefore reject the scientific findings regarding the age of the planet.