Religion is the system of human beliefs and practices in which people express their ultimate concerns about life and death. These are normally expressed in terms of relationships with and attitudes towards gods or spirits, though in humanistic or naturalistic versions of religion they may be expressed in terms of relationships with or attitudes towards the broader community of humans or the natural world. Religions also organize the ways in which such concerns are dealt with: they establish codes of recognition that make it possible for people to recognize who they are, where they are, and where they are going. This, in turn, makes it possible for them to live and work together. Religions provide maps of time and space, so that people can recognize how their lives as projects are progressing (rituals such as commemorative festivals and pilgrimages allow them to ‘visit’ the past and to experience life as a cyclical rather than linear project), and they provide projections for the future.
For these reasons, the notion of religion is an essential one. It allows us to understand that human societies have a great deal of information that is too important for them to leave to chance, and it enables us to see that this information has to be organized if it is to be preserved and transmitted. This is why, although the term’religion’ may evoke ideas of mythologies, miracles, or supernatural powers, it is better to think of religion as a system for monitoring, coding, protecting, and transmitting information which has proved to be invaluable for human life.
It is the nature of this information that makes religions so valuable, and it is why they have survived, despite the efforts of many to destroy them. Attempts to explain religion by arguing that it is the product of evolved social factors, such as those of Durkheim, or of biological factors, such as those of sociobiology, have been almost universally unsuccessful, because they impose an alien framework on a world which is fundamentally religious for most people.
Totally secular approaches to public policy, psychotherapy and education, and so on, tend to ignore the role played by religion in the lives of two-thirds of all Americans, and this is an error. For example, studies show that people with a strong sense of spirituality are generally more likely to be active in their communities and to have healthy social connections, and this has knock-on effects on their health, including a reduced risk of mortality. But there is no need to be a member of an organized religion to reap these benefits: it seems that simply taking steps to engage in healthy behaviors, form social connections and strengthen your coping skills, can have a similar effect. This, it turns out, is what you might call a spiritual diet.
