People typically think of religion as a set of rules or mandates from a god or gods. These mandates if followed will result in some paradise after death. This idea does account for quite a few of the religions that we know of today. However, it does not account for all of them. There are some sects found in the big three, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity would all fall out of this categorization. So what makes a religion?

From my understanding, the one thing that all religions share is their establishing utmost importance in something. That something of ultimate reverence could be anything or everything, and in rare cases it is nothing.

Now to hold anything with utmost importance, a religion needs a system of value. The only way to say x is more important than y is by a network of values. It need not be an external system, but it does need to be hierarchical. That is, it must be able to say x is better than y. To be able to make the judgment that x is better than y, it must be able to reference neither x or y in showing that either one is better than the other. That thing outside of x and y that you use to judge x and y is the hierarchical value system.

So given those two factors, the reverence of one thing above all others, and a system by which you can define it to be more important than all others. We have our definition. Religion is a belief that one thing is more important than everything else and has a system by which it can assign importance. I think this is a better way to define religion and will be the way that I will be using religion throughout this article.