The nature of religion: meaning, belief and practice, structures

Every human life has turning points: the birth of a child, the move from childhood into adult responsibility, committing to a partner, serious illness, the loss of someone loved and the approach of one's own death. Such events interrupt ordinary routine and raise questions that everyday problem-solving cannot settle. Why am I here? What makes a life worthwhile? Why do good people suffer? Is death the end? Where do I belong?

These are often called ultimate questions, or questions of meaning and purpose. A crisis, such as a bushfire or a sudden diagnosis, sharpens them because it exposes how little control people have over their circumstances.

Religions respond to these moments in two connected ways. They offer answers in the form of teachings, stories and beliefs about origins, suffering, moral responsibility and destiny. They also offer rites of passage: rituals that mark a person's movement from one status to another and surround that change with community support. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described rites of passage as having three phases: separation from a former status, a transitional or liminal phase, and incorporation into a new status.

Examples include Christian baptism, the Jewish bar and bat mitzvah, the Hindu samskaras that accompany a life from before birth to cremation, and funeral rites in many traditions.

Studying these responses requires a working idea of what religion is, and scholars disagree. Substantive definitions focus on what religion contains, such as belief in God, gods or a sacred reality beyond the ordinary. Functional definitions focus on what religion does, such as binding a community together or giving life meaning. Substantive definitions can exclude non-theistic traditions; functional definitions can become so broad that devotion to a football club seems to count.

Ninian Smart avoided a single definition by describing seven dimensions: ritual, narrative (mythic), experiential (emotional), social (institutional), ethical (legal), doctrinal (philosophical) and material. A tradition can be recognised by how these dimensions combine.

Being religious is also complex. It is often summarised as believing, belonging and behaving, but people combine these differently: some attend worship without firm belief, while others hold strong beliefs but rarely join communal worship. Some Australians describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are themselves diverse, with over 250 language groups, and for Aboriginal peoples the idea of Country carries law, custom, spiritual belief, family and identity together, which shows why outsider definitions built around separate religious institutions must be applied with care.