There are other religious phenomena, such as Buddhism and Jainism, which, although lacking an idea of God in terms of reference, do practice a form of respect and reverence of the “sacred divinity,” as a generic element with characteristics much more general than the Christian, Muslim or Judaic “particular gods.”

Maintaining a unitary concept of religion based solely on one’s own experience and excluding other particularities, cannot be other than a form of fundamentalism which violates the most elemental test of religious freedom.

As Max Muller affirmed, “he who knows only one religion knows none,” which would express the idea with complete precision. Durkheim himself explains the key to this phenomenon:

”... religion is a universal phenomenon which appears in all known human societies. ...”

It is routine to use known models to attempt to define the unknown. This is a procedure used to excess by social investigators in many cases. Abusing comparative analysis will lead without a doubt to blindness when faced with standards of behavior, beliefs or experiences, which cannot be explained except by omitting any other factor and their similitudes.

Religion is evidently the search, inherent in man, which the spirit makes in order to apprehend the “infinite”; the longing and endeavor of the being with regard to his sense of unfulfilled desire for infinity. Religion is, then, an absolute necessity, nothing less than a constituent of human existence, which the individual feels in order to “communicate with the infinite”; it is the source of what sustains the human being and on which man depends in many of its aspects. The definite proof of this is anthropological analysis in which distinct religious creeds or the lack of them are a determining factor for scholars in understanding social and individual standards of the behavior of societies.