Monday School: Religion… What Is It?

Monday! Time once again for Monday School. It’s “The Rational Corrective For All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!

Today’s Lesson: What Exactly Is Religion – And Is It Available With Creamy Nougat Instead Of The Usual Nuts?

I’ve come across quite a few definitions of religion over the years.

Most (but not all) closely resemble the main definition provided by my American Heritage College Dictionary: “Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.”

Many similar examples can be found on the Web.

Here are a few of them:

—– “a set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices pertaining to supernatural power” (oregonstate.edu)

—– “Generally a belief in a deity and practice of worship, action, and/or thought related to that deity. Loosely, any specific system of code of ethics, values, and belief.” (carm.org)

The last part of the second definition hints at broader uses of the word “religion.” Many of those uses are indeed “loose” and can be ignored by those interested in a serious study of the subject. Many others, however, suggest that religion is a much more complicated thing than the average person who uses the term might have ever suspected.

Here’s one example:

—– “A religion is a set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term ‘religion’ refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction.” (Wikipedia)

Other sources offer definitions that seem even more complex or confusing. At times, they can even seem downright bizarre.

Emile Durkheim gives this definition in his book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (p. 62).

C. Daniel Batson and the co-authors of Religion and the Individual say this: “We shall define religion as whatever we as individuals do to come to grips personally with the questions that confront us because we are aware that we and others like us are alive and that we will die” (p. 8).

Walter Kaufmann spends about four pages in his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy pointing out the numerous inadequacies of others in this regard. Here is what seems to be his key statement: “The chief lesson of a survey of attempted definitions of religion is that, in religion, practice, feeling, and belief are intertwined, and every definition that would see the essence of religion in just one of these three facets is too partial.” That may be accurate; I’m not sure that it’s particularly helpful.

The Encyclopedia Americana offers us this definition: “the pattern of belief and practice through which men communicate with or hope to gain experience of that which lies behind the world of their ordinary experience. Typically it focuses on an Ultimate or Absolute, thought of by some believers as God.” It adds “Religious feeling typically involves a sense of the sacred, of awe, and of mystery. Its most intense moments may be evoked by the numinous experience of a holy being….” and “The common belief in salvation, or life after death, may take the Indian form of reincarnation (rebirth) of the soul in a series of lives, or it may take the contrasting monotheistic form of a divine judgment after this one life…. Religions structure themselves through doctrine, myth, ethical values, rituals and other experiences, and various forms of outreach.”

Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia’s entry on religion opens with this throwing up of hands: “Religion is a complex phenomenon, defying definition or summary. Almost as many definitions and theories of religion exist as there are authors on the subject.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry entitled “Study of Religion” similarly gives us this: “An acceptable definition of religion itself is difficult to attain. Attempts have been made to find an essential ingredient in all religions (e.g., the numinous, or spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and the profane; belief in gods or in God), so that an ‘essence’ of religion can be described. But objections have been brought against such attempts, either because the rich variety of men’s religions makes it possible to find counterexamples or because the element cited as essential is in some religions peripheral. The gods play a very subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada (‘Way of the Elders’) Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though they may not by universal. The occurrence of the rituals of worship is typical, but there are cases, however, in which such rituals are not central. Thus, one of the tasks of a student of religion is to gather together an inventory of types of religious phenomena.”

For the purposes of this series, I have long embraced this definition: “Religion is the belief that supernatural entities and/or forces exist coupled with the belief that the things we do and/or the rituals we perform somehow influence the way these entities/forces treat us.”

That may not be a perfect definition, but if it doesn’t fit the word “religion” then we really ought to coin a word it DOES fit so I can get on with the much more important business of analyzing, critiquing, and countering all those who seem to be living their lives (and messing up mine) with that definition in mind.

(Do you have a definition of religion that works better for your purposes? Please tell me about it in a note.)

I was reminded of something I was told by a close friend about a regular monthly meeting of his local humanist group. An argument broke out (again) as to whether or not humanism ought to be considered a religion.

Most of the humanists I know seem to think that the differences between humanism and religion are greater than the similarities and that something important is lost or being ignored when humanism is grouped with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some, however, take a different view.

I don’t want to get into all the details now – but I do want to address two common claims put forth by the latter group (as well as some Christians) that I think we all need to get beyond.

The first claim goes like this: “The US Supreme Court has ruled that secular humanism is a religion.” Austin Cline succinctly blows this claim out of the water here by saying this:

“Whatever the ultimate motivations of such claims, the fact of the matter is they are simply false. First, it is not true that the Supreme Court has found Secular Humanism to be a religion. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, Justice Hugo Black wrote in a footnote that: ‘Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God is Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.’

“As a footnote, it qualifies as an obiter dictum – this means that it is simply a personal observation of the judge, and hence is only incidental to reaching the opinion. It has no real weight when it comes to legal precedent and cannot be properly considered the ‘decision’ of the court. Even so, Black was mistaken – if Secular Humanism were a religion, then it wouldn’t be secular. The terms ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ are opposites.”

I might add that the attempt to settle a philosophical dispute by appealing to a legal ruling strikes me as rather bizarre. Whether or not humanism is considered to be a religion by a judge charged with interpreting and enforcing the laws of a given locale is a very different question than the one involving self-definition that our group was attempting to wrestle with on Saturday. Just because a judge somewhere might consider a skateboard a vehicle in a case involving an insurance claim does not obligate the rest of us to include skateboards in our definition or use of the word.

The second claim goes like this: “You need only look at the etymology of the word ‘religion’ to know that it comes from the Latin ligo, ‘to bind together’ – just like the body’s ligaments bind our bones together. Humanism certainly binds us together, therefore it’s proper to call it a religion.”

Although this claim was put forward by a well-educated person whom I like and respect, it also happens to reflect a common logical error known as the etymological fallacy. Nigel Warburton’s book Thinking From A To Z explains it as the “unreliable and often misleading move from a word’s original meaning to its current meaning. A form of the genetic fallacy… [t]his sort of move is sometimes informative, but is not at all reliable: because a word or phrase originally meant one thing, the assumption is that it will always keep that meaning, even when it forms only a part of a word and is used in a different context perhaps thousands of years later, often in ignorance of the original meaning…. The most reliable indicator of a word’s meaning is its current use rather than its derivation…. The word ‘drab’ once meant ‘female prostitute.’ However, if somebody today describes a woman’s clothes as drab, this merely relates to her dress sense rather than her profession.”

There’s much more I could say about how religion is and ought to be defined – and why calling humanism (or atheism) a type of religion confuses matters far more than it clarifies them – but I think I’ve said enough for now.

Any questions? Comments? Feel free to share ‘em now!