LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Religion: Practices
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American government has long taken steps to promote or recognize religion in ways not involving financial aid: prayers in public schools and in legislatures, official Thanksgiving proclamations, and so forth. Such actions were pervasive in the de facto establishment, and the Court did not begin to scrutinize them until after Everson’s articulation of neutrality and separation principles. By that time, most of the overtly coercive practices had ceased, and relatively few cases of rank coercion have reached the Court. The more common argument against nonfinancial support of religion is that such actions depart from neutrality and officially endorse one religious position over another, or religion over nonreligion. As noted earlier, such endorsement is assertedly wrong not because it directly deprives anyone of liberty, but because—no matter how nondenominational and generic it is intended to be—it creates unwarranted discord and alienates those citizens with views on religion different from the government's.
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It appears that religion was practiced before the invention of writing, with stories passed down orally from one generation to the next. Evidence for religious ideas can be found in elaborate burial practices in which valuable objects were left with the deceased, perhaps intended for use in an afterlife or to appease the gods. This reached its most spectacular form with the creation of the pyramids of Giza and the other great tombs of ancient Eygpt. It's possible to speculate on religion developing gradually, from stories originally created for entertainment or told to children, elaborated over generations and eventually accepted as fact.
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The Sherbertâ€Yoder doctrine of exemptions can be said to protect the value of liberty or private choice in religious matters, since even a nondiscriminatory law can inflict serious burdens on religion in application. Exemption ... arguably comports more with strong churchâ€state separation by blocking government regulation of religion. The implications of equality for religious exemptions are more ambiguous. Mandatory exemptions can serve to equalize religions in practice, since minority religions are more likely to conflict with general legal norms than are majority or acculturated faiths. But if equality means how a law on its face treats religious versus nonreligious activities—what law professor Douglas Laycock calls “formal†equality—then exemptions limited to religiously motivated conduct are not required and may even be improper.
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The comprehensive professional research in 2006 by Tearfund found that two thirds (66% - 32.2 million people) in the UK have no connection with any religion or church10. In 2003 August, 18% of the British public said they were a practicing member of an organized religion, 25% they were members of a world religion9. According to these results, one fifth of self-declared members would ... not describe themselves as practicing that religion. Presumably the others remain members for traditional reasons or due to social pressure.
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The word religion is derived from the Latin noun religio, which denotes both earnest observance of ritual obligations and an inward spirit of reverence. In modern usage, religion covers a wide spectrum of meanings that reflect the enormous variety of ways the term can be interpreted. At one extreme, many committed believers recognize only their own tradition as a religion, understanding expressions such as worship and prayer to refer exclusively to the practices of their tradition. Although many believers stop short of claiming an exclusive status for their tradition, they may ... use vague or idealizing terms in defining religion—for example, “true love of God,” or “the path of enlightenment.” At the other extreme, religion may be equated with ignorance, fanaticism, or wishful thinking.
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Esotericism claims to be more sophisticated than religion, to rely on intellectual understanding rather than faith, and to improve on philosophy in its emphasis on techniques of psycho-spiritual transformation (esoteric cosmology). Esotericism refers to "hidden" knowledge available only to the advanced, privileged, or initiated, as opposed to exoteric knowledge, which is public. It applies especially to spiritual practices. The mystery religions of ancient Greece are examples of Esotericism.
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