Religion provides a sanction for principles of morality like justice, honesty, brotherhood, equality, tolerance and sacrifice and a source of motivation to work for positive social change. Religious rituals and ceremonies may also provide transformative experiences. They can involve crying, laughing, screaming, trancelike conditions and feelings of oneness with those around you. Religious beliefs can be deeply held or largely unproven. Regular practice of religion is beneficial to physical health, increases longevity and helps one recover from disease.
The range of activities now said to be religion raises a number of philosophical issues. For example, many scholars object to thinking of religion in terms of beliefs or mental states that are hidden from observation. They argue that the concept of religion is a social taxon and therefore needs to be defined with clear criteria so that it can be compared with other cultural forms of life.
Some approaches, notably those of Durkheim and Tillich, use functional rather than substantive criteria to define religion. They propose that religion is whatever a person’s dominant concern serves to organize his or her values and thereby provide orientation in life (regardless of whether this includes belief in unusual realities). These are functional definitions, rather than real or lexical definitions.
The emergence of the functional approach in the late twentieth century has raised the question of whether this is an adequate way to compare religions. The problem is that there is a danger that it will lead to a minimalist or lowest common denominator conception of religion, a sort of generic social genus.