Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's not now nor has it ever been impossible to create a religion of x - x defined as any collection of things religiously apprehended that any given person could find absolutely no quarrel with.  

AKA, good fundamentals.

The problem is what it would mean to religiously apprehend things. That isn’t going to be rational. And if it is merely being used as a synonym for passionate or emotional then you are redefining what is normally meant by a religion. Religiosity and religiousness are not necessarily the same thing. And we are normally referring to the former. Anything can be done ‘religiously’ or zealously or passionately. And if you are just saying that a collection of beliefs believed in passionately can be good then I have no quarrel with that but that is not what is normally meant by religion. Important not to equivocate.

If you feel as though a thing is sacred, anything, that's religious apprehension.   There's nothing more to it.  A-religious and irreligious people report the experience at about the same rate as overtly religious people, amusingly enough. People also refer to it as the sense of the numinous. You'll probably be passionate about whatever it is if you have a thing like that (I'm speaking in the general here, not personally of you), sure.  It would actually be weirder if people weren't emotional and passionate about something that meant that much to them.  

For religion, though - a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, things set apart and forbidden, which unite a community into a moral whole.  Religious humanism meets those criteria.  There's really no end to potential religions of x - which, imo, is what makes the poor quality of our familiar religions so alarming. We might, for example, note that a person who goes to some natural park might and have a profound experience, and on the basis of that profound experience they may devote significant time or even their entire lives to the preservation of that place where they had that experience, they may develop a world view premised on it, and on their efforts to protect it..and they may find other people with similar experiences and similar efforts and this becomes their community. That community might go out into the world and preserve more, and recruit. This might escape our detection as a religion if it;s just the one guy, or one small mostly seasonal mountain town of volunteers - but if it isn't a religion from the moment just two of these folks meet each other it's on it's way to either becoming a religion or failing to be what it could have been for some unforeseen reason. Maybe the place gets blown up for a mine - and the community dissipates. It's happened over and over again. The desecration of a sacred site being a catalyst for the dissolution of a religious community.