Religion and Belief

Man's oldest philosophy is Animism, the doctrine that eveything is alive and possesses mental faculties like those possessed by man: desire, will, purpose, anger, love and the like. This philosophy results from man's projection of his ownself, his psyche, into other things and beings, inanimate and living, without being aware of this projection.

" A belief in spirits is" according to Edward Burnett Tylor : " the minimum definition of religion", some later students, however, made the same claim for a belief in impersonal, supernatural power, or name. These two elements of religion are virtually worlwide and undoubtedly represent a very early stage in the development of religion. With time the more important spirits became gods, thus there has been a tendency towards monotheism in the history of religion.
The difference between magic and religion is another subject, both were deemed expressions of a belief in the supernatural. Some argued that religion was social
(moral) whereas magic was antisocial (immoral). Much confusion and debate would have been obviated if it had been recognized that there isn't such thing as a "correct" definition - all definitions are man-made and arbitrary and that the problem is not what religion or magic are, but what beliefs, events, and experiences one wishes to designate with the words religion and magic.