Religion is one of the first and for millennia the most successful protective systems, based on the potentialities of the brain and body for survival. It offers the context within which sanctions and rewards, approval and disapproval, inspiration and ideation are held in common. This systemic exploration, called somatic exploration by the sociobiologists, has opened people to explore their own natures and societies, and the world around them.
Often the questions arising in the study of Religion are about the definition of the concept, its function as an instrument of social organization, and its place in cultural taxonomies. It is sometimes argued that the notion of religion has been tampered with by those who have manipulated its use to promote their own ideological agendas. For this reason the term religiosity has been used to refer to a variety of practices, some of which have no connection with scrupulous devotion and others that are very different from it.
Over the past four decades, a reflexive turn in the humanities and social sciences has drawn scholars’ attention to the construction of objects that have been taken as unproblematically “there”. It is suggested here that, for those interested in understanding the diversity of Religion, it would be helpful to expand the traditional three-sided model of the ‘true, beautiful, and good’ to include a fourth C: community. This is the sense of belonging that enables people to reclaim their own humanity by recognizing the shared heritage of all human beings and to understand what it means to live life as project towards acknowledged but largely unknown futures.