The Definition Of Religion According To The Constitution By Jesse H. Choper

To many, the word religion is an offering of deliverance, insight, and a promise into heaven. It is identified as a way of life to many people of all different ethnic backgrounds. It stresses and teaches the importance of what is good and what is right, as well as what is bad and wrong in one’s belief system. The purpose of religion is to better a human beings life and get them to live what is considered to be a good life to their god, or gods. When asked to define what the word “religion” meant to them, people of diverse belief systems all had a different way of defining this word. Based on the many definitions given one may see that there is no specific way to sum up this word without leaving out other important aspects deemed important by

While other definitions are too vague and may consider anything and almost everything to be religion. In a journal article by Jesse H. Choper, we’re given a definition in which attempts to describe what the word religion has been defined as in the United States Constitutions. While expressing his concern on the definition of religion in his text Choper quotes that according to the constitution “a constitutional definition of "religious belief" may be expressed as whether the belief "occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God, or "religion" may be described as the state of being ultimately concerned"(Choper, 579). Considering this definition does not include nor exclude any one religion, it could be considered as

Imagining Religion, Smith expresses that “while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion — there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.”(Smith,date). When spiritual groups fail to differentiate what they consider to be “religion” and what society calls culture researchers are left to wonder where and when they draw a line on defining what the word means. Because researchers are not given a complete understanding on what should be considered strictly religious and what should be considered as part of their cultural beliefs people are left in