There’s a cluster of things that people like to derogate by calling them religions, and they usually get away with it. But the second someone decides that actually that cluster is good, it’s all “stop irritating people with this abuse of language”.
And you may say “well personally I’m the type to object to people who try to derogate things by calling them religions when they’re technically not.” But why gatekeep the meaning like that in the first place? The supposedly neutral conception of religion doesn’t seem like a relevant cluster of things; both people who want to derogate and people who want to compliment things by calling them religions have converged on roughly the same descriptive cluster of things, and they are both interested in whether that cluster is mostly good or bad.
Insisting “that’s not what religion is” is just denying people the natural language for discussing this natural cluster.
My issue is that usually when people call things religions to criticize they are correct to do so and I intend to continue to criticize those things, such as when people read the sequences and start treating yudkowskianism as a religion in the sense of beliefs bestowed by authority and a cause the authority commands, rather than a cluster of beliefs some dude expressed that can be processed very piecemeal.
There’s a cluster of things that people like to derogate by calling them religions, and they usually get away with it. But the second someone decides that actually that cluster is good, it’s all “stop irritating people with this abuse of language”.
And you may say “well personally I’m the type to object to people who try to derogate things by calling them religions when they’re technically not.” But why gatekeep the meaning like that in the first place? The supposedly neutral conception of religion doesn’t seem like a relevant cluster of things; both people who want to derogate and people who want to compliment things by calling them religions have converged on roughly the same descriptive cluster of things, and they are both interested in whether that cluster is mostly good or bad.
Insisting “that’s not what religion is” is just denying people the natural language for discussing this natural cluster.
My issue is that usually when people call things religions to criticize they are correct to do so and I intend to continue to criticize those things, such as when people read the sequences and start treating yudkowskianism as a religion in the sense of beliefs bestowed by authority and a cause the authority commands, rather than a cluster of beliefs some dude expressed that can be processed very piecemeal.