What are these resemblances, the elements that are constitutive of religion? Here is a list that includes those most typically articulated characteristics of religion that focuses especially on religion’s natural dimensions.
Religion, or the religious dimensions of life and culture, is often if not usually characterized by:
Beliefs in or concern about (and regarding) supernatural beings or spirits, or dramatically extra-ordinary forces, which are sometimes explicitly understood as divine or holy or conceptualized with a similar cognate.
Division of the world into sacred and profane objects or domains or spaces.
Ritual acts and forms, often focused on sacred objects or spaces, but sometimes also having to do with seemingly mundane matters, such as birth, food preparation and consumption, and death.
Beliefs and practices about, and believed to be related to, earthly and/or otherworldly destruction, and/or redemption/salvation/healing (where healing may alternatively be physical, emotional, spiritual, or all three).
Practices and techniques including trance and other extraordinary states of consciousness.
Processes and pressures that seek to get individuals or groups to alternate or retain religious allegiances and belief systems–conversion experiences and the failure or reversal of such experiences.
Affective feelings and experiences of awe, mystery, shame, love, empathy, devotion, hatred, or rage, which tend to be evoked through ritualizing or other routinized practices, and are generally believed to be conducted in the presence of sacred beings, places or things, or in concert with their wishes.
Beliefs in and practices (often, if not usually, with strong anthropomorphic dimensions) related to communicating or communing with supernatural or divine or extraordinary powers, or ultimately meaningful beings, or spirits, or forces.
Understandings of the cosmos and the place of the earth and people and other living things in it, often understood as having ultimate meaning or as being some kind of holy order; such understandings may provide a sense of well being, belonging, and/or connection between individuals and the wider spiritual/ethical communities with whom people feel associated. Such religious understandings help people to cope with and find meaning, especially in the face of anomic realities such as suffering and death.
Ethical understandings of the proper place for people and other living things in the world; these may promote or hinder social solidarity (identify morally considerable kin groups) and/or function to serve the economic, prestige, and power interests of some individuals and groups more than, or at the expense of, others.
Beliefs and practices which divide humans (and/or other living things) into hierarchical classifications and reinforce the same distinctions, which often involve the labeling of some people as divine (or at least as having special lines of communication with divine beings or places), others as ordinary (or human), and others as evil (or subhuman), legitimating the repression of the latter.
Beliefs, including narrative cosmogonies and cosmologies, which are not empirically demonstrable but are strongly reinforced through education, reinforcement/reward, penalties for deviance, and other social means.
Sacred narratives (written or oral), which are often understood to have been given to people in some special/holy way, from some special/sacred place, for some special/holy purpose.
Spiritual leadership, religious specialists, and physical/spiritual healers, who teach and assist seekers and devotees, and sometimes resist or fight (either directly or by example, exhortation, and administration) perceived, spiritual adversaries.
Beliefs and practices that govern (and sometimes consecrate) the ways people use and transform their various habitats, and that sometimes tend strongly to reinforce or work against certain forms of socio-economic organization (namely, beliefs and practices that shape and influence their environments).
Beliefs and practices that draw directly and indirectly on natural symbols and events for practices related to some or many of the above characteristics (namely, beliefs and practices shaped or influenced by their environments, such as volcanoes).
