What do you call someone

[jwoodie]

I'm assuming you mean "built into our DNA" in something like a metaphorical way. I would say that statements like "all human societies have had religious components" also run the risk of falling into vacuousness by virtue of being too abstract and vague.

I would argue that this statement is concrete and absolute, whereas statements that religion's importance is limited to its effect on social cohesion are myopic at best. For example, the Soviet Union was able to maintain social cohesion without any religion, even though most of its citizens retained their ingrained religious beliefs.

 

[Avatar4321]

I call them illogical

 

[well named]

I would argue that this statement is concrete and absolute, whereas statements that religion's importance is limited to its effect on social cohesion are myopic at best. For example, the Soviet Union was able to maintain social cohesion without any religion, even though most of its citizens retained their ingrained religious beliefs.

My statement is certainly not absolute. Hence the phrasing that universal declarations about religion "run the risk" of becoming too vague to be useful, rather than that they automatically fall victim to doing so. I'm not opposed to generalizing, I just think good generalizations are difficult.

I also did not say that religion's importance is limited to its effect on social cohesion. I said that religion was at minimum related to human survival in that way. I was responding to something you wrote:

Unless religion can be shown to be elemental to human survival, it is rational to assume that it serves some other purpose

My point is that it can be shown that religion (especially defined broadly in the way that Geertz does) plays such a role in human survival. But I also said that is true regardless of whatever more transcendental purposes we might attach to it. My point is not that religion is no more than social, it's that religion is certainly not less than social, and its easy to demonstrate the pro-social function of some common religious beliefs, e.g. the belief in punishment for sins.

Re: the USSR, one of the criticisms of Geertz' definition of religion is that it fails to draw a clear enough distinction between religion qua religion and culture in general. I think there's something to that criticism, but I also think that there is never really going to be a bright line. But I do agree that social institutions which we do not generally regard as "religious" can serve similar roles, and in fact in the secularization of the western world over the last century in particular we've seen that, although perhaps more in parts of Europe than in the US. In Geertz' terms, you could say that communist ideology in the USSR served a similar role in defining a worldview and an ethos, although it's also meaningful of course that many people retained their religious beliefs, and shared culture provided plenty of existing resources to help order daily life. Shared culture and social order are also certainly bigger than religion qua religion, but again the point was only that religion has played an important role in the maintenance of social order.

 

[Dan Stubbs]

who believes that all religions are valid attempts to explain our existence? Can an "agnostic" believe in a greater intelligence without trying to define it?

Your thoughts will be appreciated.

They can beleive whatever he or she wants to. That the way this country was made.