Adrian Wrote:The only leverage you'll get out of me on this point is regarding the "New Atheists" who certainly act like a religion, but I don't believe can be truthfully classified as one.
Since when did a religion need gods to be a religion? While it is true that the more 'popular' religions contain gods, i honestly can't see how they would be so different within a religion if the gods were substituted with "some kind of spiritual force" or other supernatural things. Perhaps a religion would be better defined as a belief in a supernatural controlling power?
But does something even need to be a belief in the supernatural to be a religion? Wouldn't superhuman suffice for all of the same beliefs? I can't see how a religion formed around a god is any different from a religion formed around a hero... but then we see that it is a religion, apart from what it is formed around. A perhaps still better definition for a religion would be quite simply "A system of faith", or rather organized faith (iow: a particular ideal that is shared among a society in an organized fashion?).
Why would a religion in particular have to worship gods? Could not human goodness be worshiped in ways no different than the worship of a god or two or ten? Why would worshiping a hero be any different from worshiping an almighty creator, except in the attributes of the thing being worshiped? Couldn't a religion contain numerous 'rites' for the things most trivial... as easily as a religion can be utterly without rites?
I think it is much more appropriate to define religion simply as "organized faith"... atheism still wouldn't be a religion... unless it was asserted by a group that gods absolutely do not exist (or other position of organized faith).
Please give me a home where cloud buffalo roam
Where the dear and the strangers can play
Where sometimes is heard a discouraging word
But the skies are not stormy all day
