Religious faith gives meaning to life and provides a sense of purpose, structure, and direction. It also enables people to cope with stressful situations and promotes physical and psychological well-being. In the modern world, religion is still vitally important and it does not seem that it will go away any time soon. It is therefore a subject worth exploring, not least because it allows us to understand how the world around us works.
A key question is what to make of the wide semantic range now attributed to the concept of religion. Some scholars equate it with a set of beliefs and practices that are regarded as innate to human nature or as essential features of the human condition. Others define it functionally, focusing on its role in society.
It is possible to move beyond these different philosophies of what constitutes religion. The Humean camp, for example, emphasizes the affective dimension of religion, playing down (though not denying) cognition. But that approach is not without its problems, notably the inability to explain how an affective state can be both particular and noncognitive.
A third way is to take a more polythetic view of the concept of religion, treating it as a sorting term for a class of social types. This is the approach taken by many sociologists today, and it avoids the claim that a social taxon like religion has an ahistorical essence. It also enables the identification of a prototypical religion that can serve as an empirical benchmark, and it is capable of recognizing a lot of properties that are shared by various members of the taxon.