A variety of different religions exist throughout the world. Each religion has its own beliefs, rituals, and holidays. It can be helpful to learn about these differences so that you are better prepared for conversations with people of other faiths. Many websites can provide basic information about the religions of the world, including their histories, core beliefs, major festivals and holidays, and geographic concentrations.
Traditionally, scholars have attempted to analyze religion by considering its social structure and analyzing the characteristics that distinguish it from purely philosophical or purely ethical systems. Such analysis has often led to a comparison of various religions and a recognition that similar characteristics run through most of them. This recognition has been a key step in the development of modern approaches to religion and prepared the way for more specialized studies.
As the study of religion has progressed, scholars have increasingly begun to question whether it is possible to understand this concept by identifying its essential properties. Most have shifted from the classical view that every instance accurately described by a concept will share defining properties with those examples to a more prototype theory of concepts (see Laurence and Margolis 1999 for an incisive discussion).
Despite the debate over the nature of religion, most scholars agree that it is a social genus with distinctive characteristics. A few have adopted a definition that drops the substantive element and instead focuses on the distinctive role that religion can play in a culture–that is, a functional definition.