Religion is an extremely diverse and rich set of social institutions that provide people with a context within which they can explore the human potentialities that give rise to such a range of different things that are done religiously. Within this context people can do a great deal of damage, in the form of spiritual terrorization, intolerance, cruelty and bigotry, social oppression, and self-opinionated nastiness. But, and here the key to understanding religions is important, religions also remain the major resource for the transformation of life and the transfiguration of art.
The term “Religion” has long been the subject of academic debate, and many people have offered alternate definitions of it. Most of these have been “monothetic” in the sense that they take for granted the classical view that every instance that can accurately be described by a concept will have a defining property that puts it in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of a “polythetic” approach to this issue.
The essence of this new polythetic approach is that instead of identifying a single property, it simply recognizes that there are multiple properties that tend to co-appear in religions and that these may be used for purposes of explanatory theory. In fact, it is akin to the way that scientists often sort different bacterial strains by their different characteristics and then use this information to develop explanatory theories about them. This type of multifactorial treatment of the class of properties that constitutes a social genus is very similar to how social science treats many other classes of concepts, and it has proven very useful in the analysis of complex phenomena.