As a concept, Religion is one of the most problematically defined social genuses. This is because, like other concepts used to sort cultural types (such as “literature” or “democracy”), it has been subjected to multiple definitions, most of which are based on the existence of a belief in supernatural entities. But such beliefs are not universal.

Moreover, as history has shown, it is possible to have a religion without believing in an afterlife or an explicit metaphysics. In such cases, the religion is a system for monitoring, coding, protecting, and transmitting information that is indispensable to the human condition: it is the knowledge of what to do in life and how to live it well.

Many scholars, including the most eminent of their time, have seen this information as worthy of protection in ways that evoke a distinctive word: Religion. These systems are, in fact, protective systems that preserve and transmit what is most valuable for human life, from sex to salvation.

This is why there are those who propose a different approach to understanding the notion of religion by dropping the belief element and defining it, as Emile Durkheim did, in terms of the role that any form of life can play in human lives, i.e., in a moral community. Such a functional definition is not as problematic as the substantive ones because it does not require a belief in supernatural entities to be a religion.