A challenge to Statler Waldorf

[Statler Waldorf]

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I have been looking around some more for definitions of religion. The trouble is that there are hundreds. Not just hundreds of opinion, but even many thesis' that are written on the subject.

Here is a paper, a bit lengthy (takes 15 minutes to read quickly) but informative. http://www.crosscurrents.org/whatisreligion.htm
It deals with the problems of how we define religion in general and how religions are studied and described. The paper does say pretty much what I think (and does note it is a common problem) - that making a classification of what a religion is, is nigh impossible. Some things that we consider religion have very little in common with the 'big three'. Where does religion stop and philosofy begin? Hard to tell. Therefor, I do take a little offense at the way you treat your description as the one true and right description of what is religion or not.

Would I come back to your fish analogy, let's replace it with a better one.
'what is life?'.
In many cases we can think of, it's obvious. In many others, it's not.
Is a robot that can self-replicate alive? If the robot is capable of human-like thought, is it alive? A virus can not multiply by itself, it needs other organisms for that. So is it even alive then?
Defining what life is, considering these things, is hard. Defining what makes a religion might even be harder.

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I don't think you should take offense at all, I never said my method was the one true method. I just didn't like it when someone (the Taoist) was claiming my method was not correct when he himself didn't offer anything better. I have no beef with you and your opinions because you are actually trying to figure out what the best method is. So I have no beef with that at all. So pretty much if there is no clear way to define religion then is it safe to say Christianity is not a religion either? I mean, if we don't have a way of proving it is a religion then nobody could really argue with the assertion that it is not one right?

As to the life thing, science has a system of dimensions of life that is used to classify what is and is not living. Is this the definitive proof of what is alive? Nope, it's just man's opinion, but it is the best we have. I think some of the methods I used for defining religion were pretty solid.

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I think I can say that I ran him off.. I joked him hard and the last response I remember him posting was crying to the mods.

Yeah leave it to the Christian to actually want to follow the rules set forth in this forum.