DM -
You’re being overly defensive here.
It is not my ultimate concern nor is it high on my list. My point was that we can choose to frame literally everything as a religion or stick to an agreed definition of what a religion is.
I personally don’t see several things as being popularly held as a “religion”. These would be political views (such as conservativism, socialism and liberalism, to name the most commonly understood) and I actually regard atheism as a poltically driven force that has come about due to religious zealotry - when the beliefs of others are used to inhibit the freedoms of others.
Within common law all peple are free to express their views. What is held up is that the law is followed within a governmental system regardless of the personal views of the indivduals yet partly shaped by the collective of these individuals. If certain freedoms are inhibited to too great a degree the people rise up in protest and it is then up to the governing body to either change the law and/or readdress the social problem being expressed better. If you have a better way to distinguish “religion” from “non-religion” then please be my guest and express it. My own attempt was a limited expression and I have stated that at some point the line of distinction becomes a huge abyss of ignorance and confusion.
Other definitions of religion focus more on the supernatural. Maybe that suits the requirements better? Then there is something I have found to be overlooked too, that is the distinction between the institute of religion and personal religion - just like with Christians, Buddhists or atheists the label doesn’t tell us anywhere near as much about the individual beliefs as we’d like to assume. I’ve even heard the term “Christian Atheist” flung around! I guess given that many people in Europe do indentify as Christian yet they don’t hold any particular religious belief, belief in the supernatural nor belief in some higher consciousness as creator of the universe. Sometimes we just do things because that is tradition and comfortable plus it helps maintain a sense of community.
It makes no difference what the etymology of “dogma” is. My authority is me and I am well aware that it is less than perfect so to say I am being dogmatic when I am not espousing anything as a given and absolute truth is disingenuous.
I think your definition of the concept of god needs felshing out more for others to grasp hold of. I am not saying you’ll succeed in your attempts to make someone understand your view but you can but try. If I may expand on your definition and then you can tell me what you think of it:
So we start with “That which no greater can can be conceived”
The easiest way to attck this, which I won’t do only outline, is to ask what is meant by “greatest”. I’ve seen many people tie up the conversation there and skupper any reasonable discussion.
The problem many would then turn to is to ask what is the greatest thing you can conceive of then? To which I doubt very much any of us can articulate well enough without having to write several thousand volumes, yet we can nevertheless all appreciate that some things are better than others and it is enough to use that as a rule of thumb in understanding the proposal of some “greatest” song, cake or painting - and what is more as we develop in life and gain new experiences our aesthetic ability will no doubt alter. What is magnificent to a child of 6 is likely deemed of facile quality to an adult, be it in whatever form of artistic appreciation we cae to mention.
Even here we find that if we were to select and distill all the greatest experiences of human activity into one singular item then would we be able to grasp it as a singular item? Are we limited to the degree of “greatness” we can comprehend? If we were could we know? These are rhetoricsl questions don’t feel the need to answer them I don’t.
In my life I conceive of a better future and then try to work towards it and by doing so I find that once it’s reached has in fact slipped by and dormed into another posibble future - and more often than not on my way to the “better future” the path teaches me something new and I reevaluate my target and then shift my direction.
So the above is an atheistic view of or concept of god. The theistic view would pertain to an actual over ruling being that punishes and rewards each human attempt to be more like god, more forgiving, more loving and more courageous. In both situations “good” behaviour is not enough to reap in success. The god/self may just as easily reward or punish an individual for reasons unseen. We prefer to point the finger at others though and stick to our conceptual view of the world if someone is actively challenging the foundations on which we stand - this is something the anthropologists Eliade and Geertz both comment on, where some part of a tribes conceptual foundation is torn out and the whole people are thrown into disarray - often leading to death and destruction due to their lack of conceptual grounding.
Here I would comment that there appears to be a distinction (and it’s quite a grey area) between how foundational concepts of social groups are maintained. For the more “religious” (for want of a better term) often an abstract concept is given physical form - a staff or symbol of power held by the leader (spiritual or otherwise.) If some misfortune befall this item the people are scared and feel like their world is falling apart - which for them it is. To us it may seem silly, but we’re no less prone to these things it’s that in modern society they are so in our face now we don’t see them. For the less “religious” (again poor wording, and I feel that this is where the term “religiosity” comes into play more readily) they tend to keep the conceptual foundation abstract and even here a change can cause havoc because there is nothing physical with which to see any particular change so if the conceptual change proposed is too dramatic people are less willing to shift from it given no physical evidence of a “broken staff” or “burned sacred text”. Funniliy enough if you are willing to look hard enough there are boons to both perspectives and from both I would say rationality and scientific method arose, yet I cannot help but feel something of the more “religious”, making concrete of the abstract, has not been fully developed yet in line with remedying the movement from broken staff to newly made staff - so to speak.
My concern is to understand what people talk about when they say “god” be them theist or atheist. I thought that was clear. I am willing to, and have to a degree, set out questions to both sides of what I believe to be reasonably equal strength. I sympathize with both the theistic view and the atheistic view, but at the extreme ends of each I am not too interested in conversing with them because I’d rather not talk in circles with people who believe the Earth was created in 7 days or who believe that all religious people are deranged morons who have a childish view of the world - I don’t think many on this forum are quite like either of those extremes, but some appear to be beyond my patience so it is up to them to settle down and drop the emotional side of their argument and speak more plainly ... or not.
Antagonism serves only to derail a reasoned and level discussion, but we’re all prone to it. Such is life
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