That depends on how you define the concept "religion" and "religions ideology". I believe the Dalits are forced to silence because of their low status and marginalization in the sociaty and as a counter effect they tend to exclude outsiders from their religious discussion and practice - just like the Saami people I study.

To the extent that anyone derives a sense of identity from 'belonging' to a religious community, the principle of inclusion in such a community necessarily implies exclusion of those who do not, since that is how inclusion is defined. This is not essentially different from supporting one football club rather than another. Football hooliganism and religious fanaticism are parts of the same phenomenon.

Read our article on Religionisation on the topic. Religion, like any ideology that defines belonging, necessarily excludes 'non-belongers'. the question is, how broad or how narrow belonging is defined and how the excluded ones are treated.

Belief is of the mind. It is not of the Spirit. Belief is useful and necessary to a point, to organize your thinking, to give your life focus and direction and orientation. But thinking, living in Separation, is never absolute. For where you are going and where you have come from are beyond the realm and the reach of the intellect. t is a human tendency in all religious traditions, more pronounced in some than in others to establish a firm and fixed idea about God and about everything else. This occurs beyond religion because it is a primary human tendency living in Separation. The purpose of Revelation is to take you beyond belief ultimately. It will use belief in the interim as a starting point, but you must go beyond this. Religion is used by governments. It is used in a quest for power. It is used to dominate and suppress populations. It has been used throughout history as a banner of war and a banner of subjugation. Human tendency towards strict ideology must be recognized and managed accordingly or humanity will not have the strength, the courage or the unity to be successful in the times to come.

Religion thrives on exclusion. It is the difference to 'other' (s) that is the bane of defining any religion. I think the concept of intersectionality might be handy if you are interested in exploring the multiple layers of exclusion inherent in religions- as well as the false sense of inclusion often employed to dazzle adherents. The existence of hierarchical structures points to this never ending mix of inclusions/exclusions.  

A brief comment on a complex topic:

Religious language, like any language, is just that -- a form of discourse whose meaning and application depends on how it is used. One and the same set of words can be utilized, on the one hand, to give voice to experiences of beauty (often so basic as to be before words), or, on the other, to exhort one group of persons to adopt hateful attitudes towards another group.

(The same of course can be said of all socio-political discourse. Sometimes it's employed in the service of bettering a society. And sometimes it's employed for prejudicial and discriminatory purposes against the socially less powerful.)

This is not about religion, in other words, it's about us.

And to offer a counter-perspective to that outlined above by Stephen David: an utterance such as Jesus of Nazareth's "Love your enemies," the embodiments of humane justice in the speech and actions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and the calls made by Gautama Buddha to drop caste distinctions and to "touch the earth" through meditative intimacy with human experience and the enactment of compassionate behaviors towards all that lives -- these are not things that "thrive on exclusion" or "the difference to others." 

Much of the healthy heart of what gets passed down and organized as "religion" is originally a form of deconstructing the ideological conceits of, precisely, exclusion and discrimination. Indeed, the etymology of the word "religion" itself means "reconnection." How often that deconstructive and potentially transformative spiritual praxis then gets turned "idolatrously" into a vocabulary that's put into the service of hateful regard and discrimination towards our fellow human beings is the great tragedy of our kind.

Nice perspective David Collins, however, the acknowledgement of 'enemies' in the utterance attributed to Jesus of Nazareth is a discourse that interpellates otherness. I doubt that such 'deconstructing' statements would be needed if there was a primordial blanket inclusion in existence. The need to create a 'select' group of pure humans remains at the centre of religious rhetorics - note the Christian vs jews/ heathen, pure vs sinners dichotomy in Biblical narratives. To take it further, even the bottom up stratification of religious power further points to an existence of exclusion at the heart of religion - this brings to mind the constant splinter groups that internal religious exclusions often synthesise. 

Nice rejoinder, Stephen. I had to look up “interpellate,” which I see defined as “(of an ideology or discourse) to bring into being or to give identity to (an individual or category).” And it prompts a now less brief comment in reply.

To me, your point reiterates the need to look closely at how language is used; and it reminds me of how much of spiritual discourse is often ultimately an adverbial matter, referencing not so much what we do as how we do it.

As an example, you mention “the need to create a 'select' group of pure humans remains at the centre of religious rhetorics.” In response to that, let me first provide some preliminary, stage-setting remarks.

I come to the question of the meanings of religious language as a contemplative, which is to say I study and practice meditation techniques (a lot). And I’m comfortable seeing much of what I’ve referred to as “the healthy heart of religion” as being a matter of direct, immediate experience – together with the experiential practices attendant to uncovering and allowing such experience, and frequently including the ways language and symbol are used to represent, convey, celebrate, gesture towards, and, on occasion, provoke such experience.

In regard to the present question that’s provided to us by Vishnu Patil, I’m especially interested in such things as how our relationship to language is altered and reframed by the sort of human experience that is so often posited as the foundational core and original raison d’être of religious and spiritual traditions.

And it appears to me – put a bit glibly – that such experience has very much to do with a fundamental sort of honesty.

Put more lyrically, such experience is to know like love like what it is to be.

And put more canonically, it’s the sort of experience and practice that is enjoined by terms like the Vedantin’s moksha, the Buddhist’s bodhi or satori, the Kabbalist’s devekut, the Sufi’s baqa, the Christian’s unio mystica, and potentially the early Jesus movement’s experience of the active reigning presence of the Divine (a.k.a., “the kingdom of God”).

There are of course a myriad of experiences and experiential practices which draw to themselves religious language for their descriptions and characterizations. But it’s not hard to find commonalities among the above listed.

And like the Buddha’s earth-touching gesture, those commonalities trend towards a kind of ultimately too-simple-for-words intimacy with being-and-experience itself.

It is that too-simple-for-words quality that always makes me cautious in regard to the potential (and tragically all too common) misuse of religious language.

Here’s an analogy for what I mean – I’ve had the experience of practicing the Buddhist jhana states (which are markedly distinct, and beautiful, meditative “absorptions”), in my sleep. And that experience of meditating during my sleep alters and reframes my presumptive habit of constructing my identity in terms of my waking, thinking “self.” The latter identity is very much tied up with linguistic structures and processes, such that, again concretely, it can be really difficult to speak effectively about experiential processes which occurred when I was sleeping, since “I” and my attendant waking-state language “weren’t there” when those experiences were taking place.

(How I nonetheless know that those experiences did indeed take place is at least twofold: The form jhanas – which is the only type with which I have had a consistent, years-long acquaintance – unfold in a set sequence of, again, markedly distinct stages. And at times I’ve woken up during the night in the middle of that sequence, along with what I can only call a kind of “body memory” for having gone through the previous stages before waking up. And, secondly, I “just knew.” Some part of me other than my waking, discursively thinking “me” knew, as it were, what it was doing.)

To get back to your statement, “The need to create a 'select' group of pure humans remains at the centre of religious rhetorics.” On the one hand, I think that that statement references an effective truth – it refers to something that people do, often, sadly, with distinctly deleterious consequences. On the other hand, it bears a kind of tacit “horizontality” if the kind of “selection” and “purity” it speaks of is understood only to apply across groups of persons … instead of also “vertically” in regards to modes of experience.

By analogy, my experience of meditating in my sleep “stratifies” (or, to borrow from the deconstructionists, “reinscribes”) my habitual “select” identification of myself in terms of my waking, thinking, talking self. It points out that there is more to me than that. And insofar as I’m inclined to be ignorant of that fact, such an ignorance and limited perspective stand in need of a kind of corrective, or, to borrow from your statement, a “purification.”

To encourage, enjoin, cajole and urge folks towards such a broadened, corrected, and/or “purified” understanding of the nature and potential of human experience is the purpose of the healthy heart of religion and its language. But the latter is then perforce a language that’s required to speak about styles of experience that aren’t linguistic. (I’m fond of suggesting we are often better positioned to appreciate the potential force and reason-for-being of much of religious language if we treat it more as a form of poetry than as a propositional, “believe it or reject it,” type of discourse.)

Zen master Yunmen, who frequently employed the vocabulary and linguistic structures of his students who posed questions to him in order effectively to upend and/or deconstruct those students’ self-limiting assumptions, referred to such a use of language as:

“Riding the thief’s horse to catch the thief.”

In such a use of language, an “otherness” is ultimately interpellated – but that “other” is now an “other” way of relating to our own habits of mind and heart. And the potential loss to ourselves involved in the sort of presumptive and prejudicial exclusion wherein we overlook, discount, or are simply oblivious to the potential of deconstructed contemplative experience, a.k.a. “honesty” – is a tragic one.

As the anonymous Christian author of The Cloud of Unknowing once put it, “I dare not lean to my own conceit, affirming it as fast true,” and, in the same spirit, he elsewhere stated, “therefore I will leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think.”

To the extent that followers of any one religion believe that they are following 'the right and only path' in this world, perhaps toward some kind of salvation in the next, then religion must inherently tend to an exclusion continuum.

Therefore, it seems to me that you need to be studying 'us' versus 'them', in which study, stereotyping will surface.

Perhaps a Phenomenological approach?

Please see the work of Amrtya Sen

Annelies Abelmann Madam,

You demand more exact definition of religion that will enlighten this discussion, I give my opinion on Religion :

Religion consists on realization. Etymology of religion lies with the Latin word religare, which means "to tie, to bind. This seems to be favored on the assumption that it helps explain the power religion has to bind a person to a community, culture, course of action, ideology etc. Religion is inseparable with man and his life. Another thing is that it is within the man. Each and every one should understand God within their soul through self-realization. Vivekananda said that man is like an infinite spring, coiled up in a small box, and that spring is trying to unfold.

Greetings that I think about removing people after accepting and then rejecting a religion if I understand correctly Hermeneutic understanding is dependent on time and place and incompatible religious aspects of human intellectual evolution will change

Yes, of course there is, just as there is in any social organization that defines itself as having boundaries -- namely all social groups by definition, otherwise "group" is a meaningless term.

A few suggestions:

First, define religion as you intend to use it in your research. 

Second, ask yourself what biases you bring to the concept of inclusion/exclusion.

Third, be sure you examine religions of all traditions/nationalities, including racial/ethnic sub-groupings within traditions/denominations, etc..

Fourth, talk to a represent group from each tradition, especially some whom researchers consider exclusive by their professional standards. Whose concept of exclusion matters, and why?

Finally, define your audience. Is your research biased by your professional need to "fit in" with this one or that one?

And good luck! This is an important question!. 

Thank you all for your meaningful contributions. I am trying to read the suggested literature.