What Is Religion?
What Is Religion?

Summary/Abstract: Based on Adib Saab’s personal research in the history of religions, this paper is an analysis of the common elements which make it possible to classify a certain discipline under Religion. These elements are: (1) separation and reunion, or appearance and reality; (2) rites; (3) good deeds; (4) emulating founders as models; (5) emulating saints. The author advocates his view that all religions are, in a profound sense, monotheistic insofar as they refer to one absolute reality of which this world or order of being is an appearance. Far from contending that the common elements singled out reduce all religions to one, the writer makes it clear that these elements refer to a functional similarity which allows us to talk about an essence of religion or of what he calls a ‘unity in diversity’. Faithful to the phenomenological approach in the history of religions, the paper is based on ‘descriptive’, rather than ‘evaluative’, comparison.

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