So I think you’re getting at a big thing I want to push back against with this post and why I felt it was worth writing.
Christianity presents a very narrow view of what religion is. Because it’s so popular and is the main religion most readers of this blog have the most exposure to, their view of religion is highly influenced by what Christianity is rather than by what the broad set of things that self-identify as religions are.
For example, you suggest religion involves a set of beliefs matching certain criteria. But some religions really don’t care what you believe! All they ask is that you carry out their rituals. Others ask for faith but not belief, but this is really weird if all you have is a Christian framing where faith is exclusively considered with respect to beliefs.
On a different note, there’s a big difference between your attempt to redefine murder and what I’m doing in this post with religion. Murder is a word we all basically agree on what it means. Religion is a word with a very vague definition that even scholars of religion can’t agree on. This means it’s reasonable to vie for a particular definition or framing of what counts as religion, whereas it’s not for murder, except in so far as we try to argue of the legal definition of murder, for example so we might distinguish between murder and manslaughter.
I think there’s a contradiction in what you’re saying. In the original article you write that beliefs are part of your definition of religion.
I’m going to say it’s this: a religion is 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.
But then in your comment here you write that at some religions don’t care what you believe.
But some religions really don’t care what you believe!
It seems to me that your definition of the word “religion” is inconsistent. Is belief a necessary component of religion or is it not?
This is just sloppy wording on my part. Maybe I should have written “acts or beliefs”. I think originally I was just going to say “behaviors” but that’s kind of jargony and vague so changed it.
I see. When you use the word “religion” what you’re describing is a social group that people signal allegiance to and whose followers think it makes life better. Like anime fans and the KKK.
This, however, is not what anyone means by the word, whatever the debates among scholars of what “religion” is. localdeity’s critique still applies.
The sentence “religion is good” expresses a proposition, the meaning of that sentence, which is a claim about the world. If you change what you mean by the word “religion”, the sentence — that is, the string of words — is unchanged, but it now expresses a different proposition. The original proposition is untouched, and its truth or falsity remains what it was. All that has been achieved is confusion.
I feel like you’re trying to claim something here that isn’t justified. I realize it’s probably just hyperbole, but if nothing else this is what I am directly saying I mean by “religion”, so your claim is immediately disproven as literally written. But I take your meaning to be something more like “it’s not what most right thinking people mean by the word”.
But words have meanings because we give them meanings and learn the meanings that others give them. You think “religion” means a particular thing. I think the word meaningfully points to a broader category than what I know many people think it does, and I’m trying to get folks to see that broader category rather than the narrower one you’re using. People have different experiences and so may reasonably disagree on the extensional definitions of words.
The title of my post is perhaps a bit provocative, but that’s inevitable since I’m making a claim that goes against the intuition of many folks on this site and it would be disingenuous if I rewrote this post in a way that didn’t reflect my actual views. Like if I subbed in another word for “religion” it would create a different kind of confusion: a confusion of omission, if you will, by failing to make clear that I think folks are confused about what category of thing “religion” should most usefully point to.
Maybe there’s no way to bridge the gap here? Like are you a positivist (your way of stating your position in your last comment reads to me like this might be one of your underlying assumption)? If so, there’s probably nothing I can do to bring you round on how I’m using words and whether or not the claims I’m making are reasonable unless I convince you out of positivism.
You are right in pointing out that my “anyone” is literally false, yourself being a counterexample. My intended meaning was not “all right-thinking people” (which would be a no true Scotsman error) but “the great generality of people”, as may be verified by looking at the great generality of people. To save time, one may look at what the great generality of people have put on the Internet. One might even just look at Wikipedia, ChatGPT, Google Images, and Dall•E. The evidence is against people in general using the word this way.
The concept that you are talking about, then, is not generally called “religion”. As you have described it, the concept includes pretty much every group activity whatever: a knitting circle, an orchestra, employment of any sort, a bingo hall, and so on. But “group activity” already covers all of that. Why do you want to substitute the word “religion”? Why do you think that the word would “more usefully point to” this vastly wider concept?
And maybe you would also include solitary activities like going for long walks on one’s own. (Meditation, which I expect you would include as a “religious” practice, is generally a solitary activity.) I’m not sure how broadly you are extending the net, or what, really, is the concept you are trying to communicate. As the cloud expands, the fainter it gets.
You think “religion” means a particular thing. I think the word meaningfully points to a broader category than what I know many people think it does
I do not think “religion” means a particular thing, independently of the people who use it. I observe by looking around me what people generally mean by “religion”. The broader category you speak of may be a useful one, but it is a different category. It seems as if you want to use the word in order to paint the broader category with the associations that people have to the word they are familiar with, or to paint the narrower category with the associations people have to the larger.
Can you describe the category you are presenting without using the word “religion”, and then say why it is “good, actually”?
Can you describe the category you are presenting without using the word “religion”, and then say why it is “good, actually”?
This is literally in the body of the post, but I can copy paste it here for you?
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.
The rest of it is all in the post. I mean I could just make up a word to sub in for religion, but I’m pretty sure you can do a find and replace for yourself if you really can’t bear to read the word “religion”.
(Sorry that this reply is a bit snarky, but I’m basically at the point where I feel like we’re talking past each other and this isn’t likely to be a fruitful conversation. I think I’ve addressed many of your concerns in various places in this comment section, but you seem really set on this point about how I used the word “religion” as if it has some magical power that other words don’t. Like words mean things to people but also the categories that words point to can change. It’s fine if you don’t like attempts like this to shift the category of “religion”, but your objections seem likely fully general objections to me against words shifting in meaning, and you’re picking on “religion” because maybe you especially don’t want it to be that anything you like gets called “religion”? I think it’d be more useful if you made an object-level argument for why “religion” should be framed as most people you know seem to frame it and why my attempted reframing is bad because then we could actually discuss something maybe. I’m not sure, and I don’t actually feel like I can or should make any specific demands of you to keep the conversation going. Anyway, this is all to say I think I’m going to drop this thread unless you have something to say that wouldn’t be addressed by me pointing to you something about how I think words work, like this or this or this.)
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?
For example, you suggest religion involves a set of beliefs matching certain criteria. But some religions really don’t care what you believe! All they ask is that you carry out their rituals. Others ask for faith but not belief, but this is really weird if all you have is a Christian framing where faith is exclusively considered with respect to beliefs.
Could you give some examples of such religions (that are recognized by many people as religions, not matching definition of religion from the post)?
Most western polytheistic religion (Roman, Greek...). Judaism*. Islam*. Buddhism. In fact Christianism with its overemphasized focus on dogmas is somewhat an exception.
I’m not saying those religions don’t include beliefs but that they are not defined by those beliefs.
The first pillar of Islam is an assertion of faith. Every Islamic teacher and academic I’ve listened to talks as if belief is just as important to Islam as it is to Christianity. Technically subordination is more important, but it’s pretty hard to have subordination without belief. Where did you get the idea that Islam doesn’t care what you believe? Are you referring to stuff like formally identifying as a Muslim in an Islamic theocracy to get a reduced tax burden?
But otherwise, yeah, you’re correct. Roman and Greek religion definitely count. So does Norse mythology. Basically any pre-civilized polytheistic animism counts. Hinduism and Shinto fit into this bucket too.
My favorite Buddhist teachers say Buddhism doesn’t require belief, but Buddhism so diverse (and “belief” is so difficult to define) that I’d be surprised if there weren’t lineages requiring belief.
I think it would be more correct to say that a focus on believing particular assertions is a fairly recent trend in religion, encompassing the past millennium or two, but really picking up in the last few centuries.
It happened in or between Christianity and Islam (as isusr points out), and they probably both influenced each other. For example, Protestant Christianity focuses a lot more on a holy book than Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, but in a way that resembles Islam’s veneration of the Quran: citing verses to prove points. Since then, Catholics and Orthodox have also stepped up their focus on the Bible. There’s a lot of cross-pollination.
In the last century or so, religious statements have been presented as a kind of alternate-science (e.g. Young Earth science), presumably to respond to an apparent threat, but this is a very new way of taking about religion. There were biblical literalists (and non-literalists) throughout Christian history, but ancient theologians would probably accuse these people of missing the point.
Meanwhile, religions with only recent sustained contract with Christianity and Islam (past half-millennium) and religions that preceded them focus a lot more on practice, i.e. ritual and social behaviors. Some belief is implicit (e.g. why leave offerings for gods or ancestors if you don’t think they exist in a form that would benefit from the offerings?), but they are much less the focus.
So I think you’re getting at a big thing I want to push back against with this post and why I felt it was worth writing.
Christianity presents a very narrow view of what religion is. Because it’s so popular and is the main religion most readers of this blog have the most exposure to, their view of religion is highly influenced by what Christianity is rather than by what the broad set of things that self-identify as religions are.
For example, you suggest religion involves a set of beliefs matching certain criteria. But some religions really don’t care what you believe! All they ask is that you carry out their rituals. Others ask for faith but not belief, but this is really weird if all you have is a Christian framing where faith is exclusively considered with respect to beliefs.
On a different note, there’s a big difference between your attempt to redefine murder and what I’m doing in this post with religion. Murder is a word we all basically agree on what it means. Religion is a word with a very vague definition that even scholars of religion can’t agree on. This means it’s reasonable to vie for a particular definition or framing of what counts as religion, whereas it’s not for murder, except in so far as we try to argue of the legal definition of murder, for example so we might distinguish between murder and manslaughter.
I think there’s a contradiction in what you’re saying. In the original article you write that beliefs are part of your definition of religion.
But then in your comment here you write that at some religions don’t care what you believe.
It seems to me that your definition of the word “religion” is inconsistent. Is belief a necessary component of religion or is it not?
This is just sloppy wording on my part. Maybe I should have written “acts or beliefs”. I think originally I was just going to say “behaviors” but that’s kind of jargony and vague so changed it.
I see. When you use the word “religion” what you’re describing is a social group that people signal allegiance to and whose followers think it makes life better. Like anime fans and the KKK.
Yes. Also like rationalists.
This, however, is not what anyone means by the word, whatever the debates among scholars of what “religion” is. localdeity’s critique still applies.
The sentence “religion is good” expresses a proposition, the meaning of that sentence, which is a claim about the world. If you change what you mean by the word “religion”, the sentence — that is, the string of words — is unchanged, but it now expresses a different proposition. The original proposition is untouched, and its truth or falsity remains what it was. All that has been achieved is confusion.
I feel like you’re trying to claim something here that isn’t justified. I realize it’s probably just hyperbole, but if nothing else this is what I am directly saying I mean by “religion”, so your claim is immediately disproven as literally written. But I take your meaning to be something more like “it’s not what most right thinking people mean by the word”.
But words have meanings because we give them meanings and learn the meanings that others give them. You think “religion” means a particular thing. I think the word meaningfully points to a broader category than what I know many people think it does, and I’m trying to get folks to see that broader category rather than the narrower one you’re using. People have different experiences and so may reasonably disagree on the extensional definitions of words.
The title of my post is perhaps a bit provocative, but that’s inevitable since I’m making a claim that goes against the intuition of many folks on this site and it would be disingenuous if I rewrote this post in a way that didn’t reflect my actual views. Like if I subbed in another word for “religion” it would create a different kind of confusion: a confusion of omission, if you will, by failing to make clear that I think folks are confused about what category of thing “religion” should most usefully point to.
Maybe there’s no way to bridge the gap here? Like are you a positivist (your way of stating your position in your last comment reads to me like this might be one of your underlying assumption)? If so, there’s probably nothing I can do to bring you round on how I’m using words and whether or not the claims I’m making are reasonable unless I convince you out of positivism.
You are right in pointing out that my “anyone” is literally false, yourself being a counterexample. My intended meaning was not “all right-thinking people” (which would be a no true Scotsman error) but “the great generality of people”, as may be verified by looking at the great generality of people. To save time, one may look at what the great generality of people have put on the Internet. One might even just look at Wikipedia, ChatGPT, Google Images, and Dall•E. The evidence is against people in general using the word this way.
The concept that you are talking about, then, is not generally called “religion”. As you have described it, the concept includes pretty much every group activity whatever: a knitting circle, an orchestra, employment of any sort, a bingo hall, and so on. But “group activity” already covers all of that. Why do you want to substitute the word “religion”? Why do you think that the word would “more usefully point to” this vastly wider concept?
And maybe you would also include solitary activities like going for long walks on one’s own. (Meditation, which I expect you would include as a “religious” practice, is generally a solitary activity.) I’m not sure how broadly you are extending the net, or what, really, is the concept you are trying to communicate. As the cloud expands, the fainter it gets.
I do not think “religion” means a particular thing, independently of the people who use it. I observe by looking around me what people generally mean by “religion”. The broader category you speak of may be a useful one, but it is a different category. It seems as if you want to use the word in order to paint the broader category with the associations that people have to the word they are familiar with, or to paint the narrower category with the associations people have to the larger.
Can you describe the category you are presenting without using the word “religion”, and then say why it is “good, actually”?
This is literally in the body of the post, but I can copy paste it here for you?
The rest of it is all in the post. I mean I could just make up a word to sub in for religion, but I’m pretty sure you can do a find and replace for yourself if you really can’t bear to read the word “religion”.
(Sorry that this reply is a bit snarky, but I’m basically at the point where I feel like we’re talking past each other and this isn’t likely to be a fruitful conversation. I think I’ve addressed many of your concerns in various places in this comment section, but you seem really set on this point about how I used the word “religion” as if it has some magical power that other words don’t. Like words mean things to people but also the categories that words point to can change. It’s fine if you don’t like attempts like this to shift the category of “religion”, but your objections seem likely fully general objections to me against words shifting in meaning, and you’re picking on “religion” because maybe you especially don’t want it to be that anything you like gets called “religion”? I think it’d be more useful if you made an object-level argument for why “religion” should be framed as most people you know seem to frame it and why my attempted reframing is bad because then we could actually discuss something maybe. I’m not sure, and I don’t actually feel like I can or should make any specific demands of you to keep the conversation going. Anyway, this is all to say I think I’m going to drop this thread unless you have something to say that wouldn’t be addressed by me pointing to you something about how I think words work, like this or this or this.)
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?
“How many legs does a dog have, if you call its tail a leg?”
“It doesn’t matter, the dog isn’t going to walk on its tail whatever you call it.”
Could you give some examples of such religions (that are recognized by many people as religions, not matching definition of religion from the post)?
Most western polytheistic religion (Roman, Greek...). Judaism*. Islam*. Buddhism. In fact Christianism with its overemphasized focus on dogmas is somewhat an exception.
I’m not saying those religions don’t include beliefs but that they are not defined by those beliefs.
The first pillar of Islam is an assertion of faith. Every Islamic teacher and academic I’ve listened to talks as if belief is just as important to Islam as it is to Christianity. Technically subordination is more important, but it’s pretty hard to have subordination without belief. Where did you get the idea that Islam doesn’t care what you believe? Are you referring to stuff like formally identifying as a Muslim in an Islamic theocracy to get a reduced tax burden?
But otherwise, yeah, you’re correct. Roman and Greek religion definitely count. So does Norse mythology. Basically any pre-civilized polytheistic animism counts. Hinduism and Shinto fit into this bucket too.
My favorite Buddhist teachers say Buddhism doesn’t require belief, but Buddhism so diverse (and “belief” is so difficult to define) that I’d be surprised if there weren’t lineages requiring belief.
Belief isn’t central to Daoism either.
I think it would be more correct to say that a focus on believing particular assertions is a fairly recent trend in religion, encompassing the past millennium or two, but really picking up in the last few centuries.
It happened in or between Christianity and Islam (as isusr points out), and they probably both influenced each other. For example, Protestant Christianity focuses a lot more on a holy book than Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, but in a way that resembles Islam’s veneration of the Quran: citing verses to prove points. Since then, Catholics and Orthodox have also stepped up their focus on the Bible. There’s a lot of cross-pollination.
In the last century or so, religious statements have been presented as a kind of alternate-science (e.g. Young Earth science), presumably to respond to an apparent threat, but this is a very new way of taking about religion. There were biblical literalists (and non-literalists) throughout Christian history, but ancient theologians would probably accuse these people of missing the point.
Meanwhile, religions with only recent sustained contract with Christianity and Islam (past half-millennium) and religions that preceded them focus a lot more on practice, i.e. ritual and social behaviors. Some belief is implicit (e.g. why leave offerings for gods or ancestors if you don’t think they exist in a form that would benefit from the offerings?), but they are much less the focus.