What makes different institutions, beliefs and so on all religions is not that they have the same essence, but that they share what Wittgenstein called a “family resemblance”. And just like family noses, I think we can describe what some of these resemblances are. At risk of complicating the metaphor, we can see the family resemblances reflected in the ways in which all religions resemble a family, at least if their key features are described in shamelessly stereotypical terms.