Religion is a system of beliefs, worship and selfless devotion. There are about 4,200 religions in the world today and each of them has its own core belief system. The core belief is that human beings are divine and the way to connect with divinity is through their own spirituality. Those who are religious have developed their own sense of spirituality and are able to live with a purpose that has a higher meaning in life.

While the term religion may mean different things to many people, there are a few broad definitions that are often used. Edward Burnett Tylor, for example, defined religion as the belief in a supernatural being. He argued that narrowing the definition to include only belief in a supreme being or judgment after death or idolatry would exclude many peoples from the category of religious and that a belief in spiritual beings exists in all cultures.

Another way to define religion is as a feeling of dependence on the Deity and a persuasion that the Divine Being can bring man into friendly communion with Himself for his weal or woe. This sense of dependency is not an automatic component of all religion, but a vital one for most followers of the various faiths. It is a fundamental motivation that causes men to seek to establish a spiritual relationship with the Divine.

A third common definition of religion is as a set of social practices that are predicated on the belief in a supernatural being or beings. This concept has been most frequently applied to the practices of various indigenous and abrahamic peoples, although scholars have also used it to describe the spirituality of Navajo and Athenians or the practice of the Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism.

Most of the efforts to analyze religion have been monothetic, meaning that they operate with the classical view that every instance accurately described by a given concept will share a particular property that distinguishes it from other instances. A few, however, such as Clifford Geertz and Alfred Asad, have criticized the classical approach and called for an examination of the social context and the disciplinary perspective that help shape the meaning of symbols, and thus of the concept of religion itself.

There is a movement in the social sciences and humanities to adopt what are called polythetic approaches to understanding religion. This movement has been spurred by a number of developments. In particular, the rise of postmodernism in the arts and humanities has caused some to question the objectivity and rationality of traditional methods for analyzing the phenomenon. It has also become clear that, as a result of the diversity of religious cultures, there is no single, universal definition of religion. Therefore, the study of religion must be informed by polythetic and ethnomethodological research.