Religious symbol in the context of "Religious"

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.

The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.

The Christian cross, seen as symbolizing the crucifixion of Jesus, is a symbol of Christianity. It is related to the crucifix, a cross that includes a corpus (a representation of Jesus's body, usually three-dimensional) and to the more general family of cross symbols. The term cross is now detached from its original specifically Christian meaning, in modern English and many other Western languages.

The basic forms of the cross are the Latin cross with unequal arms and the Greek cross with equal arms; there are numerous variants, partly with confessional significance - such as the tau cross, the double-barred cross, triple-barred cross, and cross-and-crosslets - and many heraldic variants, such as the cross potent, cross pattée, and cross moline, cross fleury.

The patriarchal cross is a variant of the Christian cross, the religious symbol of Christianity, and is also known as the Cross of Lorraine. Similar to the Latin cross, the patriarchal cross possesses a smaller crossbar placed above the main one so that both crossbars are near the top. Sometimes the patriarchal cross has a short, slanted crosspiece near its foot (Russian Orthodox cross). This slanted, lower crosspiece often appears in Byzantine Greek and Eastern European iconography, as well as in other Eastern Orthodox churches. In most renditions of the Cross of Lorraine, the horizontal bars are "graded" with the upper bar being the shorter, though variations with the bars of equal length are also seen.

Illyrian religion refers to the religious beliefs and practices of the Illyrian peoples, a group of tribes who spoke the Illyrian languages and inhabited part of the western Balkan Peninsula from at least the 8th century BC until the 7th century AD. The available written sources are very tenuous. They consist largely of personal and place names, and a few glosses from Classical sources.

Still insufficiently studied, the most numerous traces of religious practices of the pre-Roman era are those relating to religious symbolism. Symbols are depicted in every variety of ornament and reveal that the chief object of the prehistoric cult of the Illyrians was the Sun, worshipped in a widespread and complex religious system. The Illyrian Sun-deity is figuratively represented on Iron Age plaques as the god of the sky and lightning, also associated with the fire altar where he throws lightning bolts. Illyrian deities were mentioned in inscriptions on statues, monuments, and coins of the Roman period, and some interpreted by Ancient writers through comparative religion. To these can be added a larger body of inscriptions from the south-eastern Italian region of Apulia written in the Messapic language, which is generally considered to be related to Illyrian, although this has been debated as mostly speculative. There appears to be no single most prominent god for all the Illyrian tribes, and a number of deities evidently appear only in specific regions.