semantics, terminologyMany of the questions here use the word “religion,” but I’m not sure there is an agreed upon definition of what “religion” means.
Is there such a defintion? If not, would you like to put yours forth so that we can come to some kind of tentative agreement?
One of the reasons I ask this is because of the casual way the word “religion” and “religious” can get used in everyday speech. For instance, I heard someone make the comment: “He works out religiously.” meaning that that someone works out regularly and habitually. For obvious reasons, I’m not sure that this use of “religion” applies here.
Nonetheless, in sustaining a dialog on any topic it is necessary to be speaking the same language so that we aren’t talking past each other. In furthering this interest and being able to more reliably answer questions, when we speak of religion, what specifically are we speaking of and how does that definition come about?
There are many ways of defining religion. To ask an atheist how they define religion, the minimal necessary definition would a system of belief that relies on some [god or other non-personified supernaturalist] explanation of the world.
Another approach is the essentialist vs. polythetic. For these two different approaches to defining a religion, here are the explanations per T. Jeremy Gunn:
He also explains that religion can be culled together as Belief, Identity, and a Way of Life. For more reading, I would strongly recommend perusing the second link.
I’ll take a shot at this question.
It begins with an idea. Maybe it’s an offshoot of a pre-existing idea and maybe it’s a completely new one. The idea always begins with attempts to answer the big unanswerable questions (and maybe even by posing such unanswerable questions on their own). Questions like: “why are we here?” “what happens when you die?” “what is the ‘right’ thing to do in such-and-such circumstance?” (with that last question, it’s one of those general moral dilemmas that are natural offshoots of living in a complex world, and generally touch on questions like: may I commit some unspeakable atrocity against one person if I knew the result would be the betterment of the lives of countless others?)
Then the person talks about the idea and finds that he (historically it has been a ‘he’ more often than not but there’s nothing preventing the person from being a woman) is a gifted speaker, charismatic, and a small band of people start listening to him, taking his words as being truthful and regarding the original person as their leader.
After that, the followers start to echo the words of the leader and start to communicate it on a wider scale. There may be some misinterpretations along the way, but what’s important here is not the misinterpretations but rather the fact that more and more people will now listen to the words of the leader – or the retellings of those words if the leader is not available for any reason. It may also represent a threat to the status quo in the world of politics or pre-existing religion. At this stage, the idea and its leader can fairly be termed a “cult”.
Once we have reached the status of a cult, one of two things is going to happen: the idea will die out, or it will persist. The idea may die out because of infighting among the followers, or it may die out because the leader himself (see above about my use of the male-specific pronoun) died, or even because it was quashed by the powers-that-be.
If the idea persists, however, it is because a sufficiently large and convincing group of people were enabled the cult to grow larger. There will be more and more compromises of the original idea in the hopes of gaining more converts (i.e., assimilating pre-existing religious ideas into the new one). There will come a tipping point sometime after that, then, when the cult gains some degree of social and political clout and recognition. At this stage, it is a “religion”.
Of course, once it’s a religion, there will always be the chance that new ideas and new charismatic leaders might induce some to break away and form a new cult, which, over time, could become a new religion, and thus the cycle continues.
Even though it wasn’t a part of the original question, it certainly bears mentioning that the main difference between a cult and a religion is the number of followers and amount of political clout. I don’t have any sense of what the magic number of followers needs to be in order to make the transition, but if you look at modern-day cults such as the Branch Davidians, Jews for Jesus, Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, Raelians, etc., and compare them with early Christians, Mormons, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims, etc., you’re not going to see a whole lot of differences….
Religion- a group of social constraints governing the actions of a group people whose unifying belief system includes, but is not limited to, the idea that a force outside scientific inquiry influences the physical world.
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