Discourage talking about ‘religions’ or ‘faiths’; instead, talk about specific claims/hypotheses. Rename the field ‘philosophy of religious claims’, if that helps.
When we say ‘religion’, (a) it creates the false impression that claims must be a package deal, so we can’t incrementally update toward one specific claim without swallowing the entire package; and (b) it encourages people to think of claims like theism in community-ish or institution-ish terms, rather than in hypothesis-ish terms.
IMO this promotes a particular form of religious belief / way of thinking about religion into “what religion is”, in a way that seems wrong-headed to me. Not all religions are about how getting into heaven depends on whether or not you believed the right things, such that we should pay intense scrutiny to propositional claims.
Like, not all religions are about holy texts; a number of them would simply evaporate (or lose critical components) if you deleted all human memories and just left behind what they’ve written. How can you have Zen lineages or similar things (that rely on the intense transmission from human to human outside of texts) without memories? How can you tell whether or not someone is the rightful caliph without knowing their genealogy, which isn’t part of the holy text?
IMO this promotes a particular form of religious belief / way of thinking about religion into “what religion is”, in a way that seems wrong-headed to me. Not all religions are about how getting into heaven depends on whether or not you believed the right things, such that we should pay intense scrutiny to propositional claims.
Like, not all religions are about holy texts; a number of them would simply evaporate (or lose critical components) if you deleted all human memories and just left behind what they’ve written. How can you have Zen lineages or similar things (that rely on the intense transmission from human to human outside of texts) without memories? How can you tell whether or not someone is the rightful caliph without knowing their genealogy, which isn’t part of the holy text?