Religion is the source of many of humankind’s greatest achievements. It has inspired art and architecture, music, dance, agriculture, and the exploration of the cosmos that issued eventually as the natural sciences. It has also provided intellectual sustenance, enabling people to cope with difficult times. It teaches them to transform minus into plus, and to see thorns as flowers.

Anthropologists think that early religions arose out of humans’ attempts to control uncontrollable parts of their environment, such as the weather or the chances of success in hunting. The attempt to do this was often accompanied by the use of magic and supplication, or prayers. Tribal totems, ancestor worship, and belief in guardian gods led to increasingly complex systems of beliefs that became known as religions. These were accompanied by rituals and prescriptions for behavior, or things to do and things not to do.

Emile Durkheim, a pioneer of sociology, stressed the functions that religions serve in society. He saw that, despite the lack of beliefs in disembodied spirits or specific cosmological orders, religion provides comfort and hope for billions of people. It gives meaning to their lives, reinforces social stability, prevents hostility between different religious groups, and may motivate them to work for positive social change.

Other scholars have taken a more symbolic interactionist approach. Ninian Smart, for example, has identified seven dimensions of religion: the practical and ritual; the experiential and emotional; the narrative or mythical; the doctrinal and philosophical; the ethical and legal; and the material (art, buildings, and sacred sites). This is similar to the model of the four C’s of religion proposed by Catherine Albanese.