The word religion means submission to God. Religion is the way in which human beings submit themselves to Him, acknowledging Him as the only one able to save them from evil and bring them happiness. The intellectual basis of this submission is belief in a supreme Being or Beings and a life of obedience, morality, and worship. In practically all religions, individuals do not acquire this belief independent of their parents and elders; they come to know it through authoritative teaching made venerable by immemorial usage.
In most theories of the origin of religion, the notion of a God is used to explain what human beings feel to be a deep need in their natures. Those who believe in a biological origin for religion suggest that humans developed spirituality in response to their awareness of the process of death and a desire for either a means to avoid it or a chance to go on to something more pleasant.
Other scholars, however, have pulled back the camera and analyzed how the concept of religion was defined at particular times and places. They have suggested that narrow definitions, such as Edward Burnett Tylor’s “belief in spiritual beings”, exclude many societies from the category of religious and therefore misrepresent a universal phenomenon. A more recent, and arguably more valid approach has been to consider a functional definition of religion, such as that of Durkheim. This definition defines religion as whatever dominant concern organizes a person’s values, whether or not that concern involves belief in unusual realities.