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Personally, I think that Merriam-Webster explains quite well what I view religion as...
a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
and since religious is described as: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity
Then religion is: A personal set or institutionalized system of attitudes, beliefs and practices relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity.
This makes deity an option, but not required as there is also "ultimate reality" available as well. This covers religions which have beliefs concerning karma and enlightenment and so on yet no particular god concept. That there is more to the world than just what we can see, taste and touch, but there's no definitive stance on deity. This makes religion something that deals with beliefs and practices concerning concepts of what may be "beyond" this physical world.
Quoted for Truth.But it's worthless if it isn't put into practice.
-J.Z. Smith, Imagining Religion...while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion — there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.