Lesson 1.2: What is Religion?

Religion is embedded in the world we live in with many people of different cultures practicing it daily and using it as the foundation of their beliefs. To gain a better understanding of the world around us, we need to reflect on the idea of what religion is about. Before this lesson, I thought I had a general idea of how to define religion. What I believed the meaning of religion was only assumptions influenced by my surroundings. After reading through the first chapter of Nye’s “Religions: The Basics”, I realized religion is an ambiguous term. It is challenging to define a word that does not have a universal meaning because of how broad it is. Religion can refer to numerous things such as the characteristics of human behavior and also as a form of ideas and beliefs. Since religion is ingrained in the everyday lives of many people’s culture, we should take into consideration that every religion is uniquely different. We have to be open-minded that religion contains many aspects and does not have a distinctive meaning.