Ok, I had lost sight of that in this conversation.
“A cultural and social thing where people seriously dedicate themselves to something, demonstrate their dedication via acts and beliefs, and by doing so live a life they consider more worth living than if they didn’t.”
That seems a worthwhile thing (provided the thing they are dedicating themselves to is worthwhile, or at least not actively bad). It happens everywhere. I just don’t get why you want to associate this general phenomenon to the more limited instances of it that the word “religion” covers, when that requires dropping everything from the narrower concept that touches on the supernatural, the moral, and the spiritual.[1] Whatever debates scholars have over the boundaries of what-it-is-that-they-study, I doubt if anyone would look at your characterisation of the-thing-that-you-want-to-point-at and unpromptedly call it “religion”.
My religious upbringing was similar to yours, except that it was similar to everyone else’s in my environment. No-one seemed to take it as anything more than “the done thing”. Anyone showing signs of actually believing would have been thought a bit odd. Church twice a year, Christmas and Easter, of course you don’t pay any attention to the sermon, it’s just something that happens in church, you sing the hymns because you sing the hymns, you get married in church because of course you get married in church. Pure simulacrum level 4. I once described this to someone who was brought up in an actually believing Mormon family, although having left that faith himself for atheism, and he responded, “that’s not a religion, it’s barely even a social club.” Some “religion” is like that, a dead shell of what was. Is a dead pig a pig? It doesn’t matter, what matters is, is it fresh enough to turn into bacon?
Ok, I had lost sight of that in this conversation.
“A cultural and social thing where people seriously dedicate themselves to something, demonstrate their dedication via acts and beliefs, and by doing so live a life they consider more worth living than if they didn’t.”
That seems a worthwhile thing (provided the thing they are dedicating themselves to is worthwhile, or at least not actively bad). It happens everywhere. I just don’t get why you want to associate this general phenomenon to the more limited instances of it that the word “religion” covers, when that requires dropping everything from the narrower concept that touches on the supernatural, the moral, and the spiritual.[1] Whatever debates scholars have over the boundaries of what-it-is-that-they-study, I doubt if anyone would look at your characterisation of the-thing-that-you-want-to-point-at and unpromptedly call it “religion”.
Words do shift in meaning, but that is not licence for anyone to arbitrarily redefine a word, as in the old conundrum about how many legs a dog has if you call its tail a leg.
But I am happy to end this here, as I think everything has been said, even if agreement has not been reached.
My religious upbringing was similar to yours, except that it was similar to everyone else’s in my environment. No-one seemed to take it as anything more than “the done thing”. Anyone showing signs of actually believing would have been thought a bit odd. Church twice a year, Christmas and Easter, of course you don’t pay any attention to the sermon, it’s just something that happens in church, you sing the hymns because you sing the hymns, you get married in church because of course you get married in church. Pure simulacrum level 4. I once described this to someone who was brought up in an actually believing Mormon family, although having left that faith himself for atheism, and he responded, “that’s not a religion, it’s barely even a social club.” Some “religion” is like that, a dead shell of what was. Is a dead pig a pig? It doesn’t matter, what matters is, is it fresh enough to turn into bacon?