My Almighty VS your argument against it

[vulcanlogician]

Just underneath the surface there, is the idea that religion is something that's done to people, not something they do.  No one has ever been tricked into a religion.  A persons religion is a description of their deepest and most genuinely held normative beliefs shared by a community.  

What about kids raised in the Twelve Tribes cult? In that case, religion is undeniably something that's done to people. 

Is that a fringe case? Sure. But coercion like that goes on, albeit in more dilute form, in evangelicals and other "mainstream" religious practices. 

At it's best religion can be a description of deeply held (communal?) normative beliefs. (I actually quite like that definition.) But, all over the place religion is entwined with descriptive statements about reality. Descriptive statements that are highly suspicious. Hell, even the normative claims are quite often poorly constructed. But, at least it is conceivable, in principle, to have a religion with solid, defensible normative beliefs. And a like-minded community would make the common normative beliefs more useful.

[The Grand Nudger]

It continues to be problematic (for me*)making bins to toss things in. Religion at it's best and it's worst is a description of deeply held normative beliefs.

Agree wholeheartedly. Poor descriptions of the world, misunderstandings about moral fact included. We've been learning on the job. It's not so much that a like minded community makes the common beliefs more useful - the common beliefs make our communities more useful..make us like minded. The trick, as you noted before with the wide net, and as I was commenting on with the perpetuity of reformers work..is that our minds are diverse, change over time and..certainly, also in light of new information (and I mean that as a separate category from simple drift).

So......the sacred, well, it's a moving target. Religions that last long enough will accrue the baggage of the deceased..which may no longer represent any manageable uniformity between the living. To some extent, that's baked into any and every ideology of how the world should be. We understand and accept that some highly motivational fiction lubricates a society that might otherwise be grinding itself apart. Chasing that six figure dream, for example. However, chasing that six figure dream is what made all of this..the best, and the worst.

From a reformers (or even an anthropologists) view..we've not become less religious - we've begun to find those few bones that all of our previous fictions had at their centers. The bones left behind inside the funerary wrappings of culture. That we're describing that system of solid, defensible normative beliefs, if only by crossing out all the wrong words. We might (temporarily) decide not to think of it as a fundamentally religious endeavor, but that's due to negative associations with the word. I mean we in the general. Not you, or I, or housecat..specifically. In fact, if we're at one of those transitions in concept about the sacred...if the old ones had failed but the full throated version of the next has yet to be uttered..we can practically gaurantee that there will be alot of people with no religion whatsoever. They may still be superstitious..ofc.

[Alan V]

At it's best religion can be a description of deeply held (communal?) normative beliefs.

More typically, religious displays are varieties of virtue signalling for social benefits, called something else for the same reason.

The confusion which follows is that many people believe those who don't make such displays are somehow less moral. I don't think this assumption is upheld by statistics.

[The Grand Nudger]

OFC not, but those statistics also imply that people who don't describe themselves as religious do perceive some thing to be sacred or sacred-alike, and do have normative beliefs about a good life in context to that thing, and do share those beliefs with a community outside of a superstitious one.

Are all of those displays also varieties of virtue signaling for social benefits? I mean...can we allow that people to hold genuine beliefs about anything?