What is Religion?

Interesting. People taking their time to participate in these services just as a spoof. Whaddabout the American Humanist Association, the Council for Secular Humanism, the IHEU, etc. ? They've been going on for decades and people keep attending the services. Of course, to some extent they function as a support group in a society permeated with theistic religion. But they seem also to express a spiritual need for meaning or ultimate concerns that go beyond self. BTW I'm not stripping the words of theistic meaning. I'm telling you how others who have studied the subject use them.
I see no purpose in continuing our discussion here, since I gather after 541 posts that your mind is pretty well made up on this subject.

 

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Atheists like any other religion still need to at a minimum get ordained to to perform religious ceremonies and rituals.

 

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the historical record however demonstrates a preponderance of evidence pointing to religion initially being secular and evolving into deities later on.

So what I dont understand is how you maintain it must be the worship of a deity or its not religion?


Prehistoric religion

The Venus of Laussel, a stone relief of a seated woman
Part of a series on History of religions



Founding figures
Study of religion
The study of Neanderthal ritual, as proxy and preface for religion, revolves around death and burial rites. The first undisputed burials, approximately 150,000 years ago, were performed by Neanderthals. The limits of the archaeological record stymie extrapolation from burial to funeral rites, though evidence of grave goods and unusual markings on bones suggest funerary practices. In addition to funerals, a growing evidence base suggests Neanderthals made use of bodily ornamentation through pigments, feathers, and even claws.[21] As such ornamentation is not preserved in the archaeological record, it is understood only by comparison to modern hunter-gatherers, where it often corresponds to rituals of spiritual significance.[22] Unlike H. s. sapiens over equivalent periods, Neanderthal society as preserved in the archaeological record is one of remarkable stability, with little change in tool design over hundreds of thousands of years;[21]

Religion exists in all human cultures,[5] but the study of prehistoric religion was only popularised around the end of the nineteenth century.

Prehistoric religion - Wikipedia


It would seem there is no justification for you to hold fast to religion = deity worship since before it was deity worship it was totally mundane and secular.

 

That is an error, it should have read 'materially' sacred, ie without a deity.

 

Ok then, since secular came first, you should be arguing that religion has little to nothing to do with a deity, I agree.

Of course, you dont create a definition without first having something to define!

no it just means it not as narrow as you prefer, in fact it can be both which is why these rites are defined as sacred, a subset to religion.

 

It's not just up to me, but also to the sources on spirituality I cited.

If redefining certain words, such as spiritual, to suit their purposes means scholars knowledgeable in a field adopting a definition that seems more useful than one based on lay usage, I plead guilty.

I don't think that would be possible![/quote][/QUOTE]

 

Scholars trying to figure out how religions began have a choice: either extrapolate on the bass of the available data or forget it. I, and most of them, are willing to take a chance and venture reasonable conclusions based on substantial evidence. These conclusions are based on: archaelogical evidence of prehistoric humans and anthropological evidence of present-day hunters and gatherers. ShyOne talks about Neanderthal burials, which were pre-homo sapiens. There is scholarly disagreement about whether or not they show evidence of religion, but they certainly seem to show evidence of reverence for the deceased--burial, placement in fetal position, red ochre. When it comes to the first homo sapiens, the evidence is more compelling: grave goods, suggesting a concept of the afterlife. Absen t time travel, we will never know for sure, but that's what it seems to mean in present-day hunter-gatherer societies.

What else do you think it might mean? Maybe a vulture landed on the body, and the people just threw the dirt in on top of it? Early homo sapiens of the Paleolithic buried their dead with bone and ivory beads other prestige grave goods which were sometimes elaborate, indicating that the buriers went to considerable trouble. At an Upper Paleolithic site at Sungir, people were buried with 10,000 ivory beads, ivory spears, and ivory bracelets, involving an estimated labor of 9,000 man hours. Quite a lot of trouble for some dead people. The skeleton of the Brno shaman in the Czech republic was accompanied by 600 fossil dentalia shells that must have taken generations to collect. (Oliva,2000, "The Brno II Upper Paleolithic Burial", Roebroecks, et al, Hunters of the Golden Age, p. 150. No evidence of gods, but most archaeologists are willing to take it as evidence of belief in a soul and afterlife.

You might say that, but then again you're not really up on it, are you? Archaeologists and anthropologists say otherwise. You could say that during 99% of human existence before gods were invented, everybody was an atheist like you and Richard Dawkins. Or you could find in the cave art seeming to depict shamanic activity, painted by torchlight in remote parts of the cave mere aesthetic expression. Or in the "venus' figurines of the Upper paleolitihic the beginnings of cave man porn. Mebbe so. Most scholars see similarities between these early patterns and ones found in hunter-gatherer societies of today, and see a continuity between these primal patterns and the more elaborate ones later on. Anthropologists studying the so-called "pre-animist" beliefs in amophous impersonal forces like the Melanesian/Poynesian mana, Iriquois orenda, Lakota wakan, etc. consider them religious. Most scholars studying these phenomena, following R.R. Marett in the Threshold of Religion, regard these as religious--belief in unseen forces that influence human activity. They are not gods, but they are functional equivalents. Then came animism, a belief that everything--trees, rocks, plants, etc., is possessed by a spirit that should be respected. The line between spirits and gods seems to be a matter of scope of jurisdiction. Spirits are confined to the particular rock, plant, animal, etc., that is encountered. Gods are supernatural beings with jurisdiction over various categories of these. They made their debut in the Neolithic. Before there were gods proper, there was mana, or mysterious impersonal forces (Maret), magic ,or the use of rituals to control nature (Frazer), ancestor worship, based on a belief that the departed were still around as invisible presences (Pencer; Shiels); and fetishism, the veneration of objects believed to have magical or supernatural potency (Durkheim).

Religion can never be secular. That would be a contradiction in terms. Durkheim distinguished between the sacred, which he associated with religion, and the secular, which described other aspects of primal life.

 

All science involves a degree of extrapolation from the data. In the hard sciences, the standards for extrapolation are more rigorous: a statistical method of predicting the value or state of a variable based on its current state.
https://builtin.com/data-science/extrapolation
Trend Extrapolation - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
Daniel Steel(2007) Across the Boundaries: Extrapolation in Biology and Social Science
In science, extrapolations are made on the basis of a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, to the satisfaction of expert peer referees and the scientific community. In fields that aren't amenable to the rigorous standards of the physical sciences, it is common to use less demanding standard of preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) and rational basis (enough to convince a reasonable expert, even though other reasonable experts may not be convinced. The latter two are standards of plausibility rather than scientific certainty, and are useful in theory building as pieces of the puzzle, pending further evidence. Informed expert opinion. It should be obvious that in studying the origin of religion, where the prehistoric subjects are illiterate, we must either opt for the lower standards or give up the enterprise entirely. Educated expert opinion based on the available evidence isn't just a "guess". Science may be described as a systematic field of study based on the available evidence and/or the knowledge that is obtained from such study." Religious studies are not an exact science, but they represent the most plausible explanations based on the available evidence.

I find myself in a position in life where I feel that I need to take action on matters when scientific proof is not available. Voting, for example. I can't prove that Trump is unfit to serve again as President, but I think there is abundant evidence pointing in that direction, and I'm willing to extrapolate on the basis of his past performance to what he would do if elected again. I take the same approach to religion.

 

Is secular always related to religion?
In contemporary English, secular is primarily used to distinguish something (such as an attitude, belief, or position) that is not specifically religious or sectarian in nature (for example, music with no religious connection or affiliation might be described as "secular"). However, certain meanings of secular do have some basis in religion, such as "not bound by monastic vows or rules," and "of, relating to, or forming clergy not belonging to a religious order or congregation."

These dictionaries need to catch up to the times

A secular religion is a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly entities.

Secular religion - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Secular_religion

 

Wow, circular reasoning!

Anything material can become sacred depending on what it represents.

The cow, a revered animal in Hinduism

In the Hindu religion, the cow has acquired a sacred status. It used to be sacrificed like other animals and offered to the gods and its meat was eaten.

The sacred cow - Alimentarium
https://www.alimentarium.org › fact-sheet › sacred-cow


Sacred cows? Thats as material and secular as it gets.

 

I was going to give you a like until you brought this up. Enjoy brandons gift to you; ludicrous high inflation! LOL

 

and as shown to you earlier and in the OP he took it one step further.

"Religion is best characterized as the non-empirical homologue of ideological beliefs, by contrast with science or philosophy the cognitive interest is no longer primary, but gives way to the evaluative interest."

 

Maybe that's because you live in a society where burial and flowers have long been the custom. Burials per se aren't evidence of religion. Elaborate burials, with positioning of the body and grave goods are, although not conclusive.

No, but I do think that if you don't have much background in an area you might show greater respect for people who do, like the ones writing books, refereed articles, and entries in encyclopedias. You haven't just been giving your opinion, but have been asserting it as the right one, although you'll tolerate others as misguided.

Not our own purposes, but those of the anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists. etc., you seem to dismiss.

If you insist on defining religion to include god as the indispensable criterion, that's certainly your prerogative. Most scholars do not. At least I haven't encountered any. Can you name one who does and give us the citation? (other than a dictionary of popular usage). As I've said, it's legitimate to define terms in a way that you find useful if you make your usage clear. But saying that humans had no religion until the Neolithic or very late Paleolithic when long before that they were employing shamans to use spells to heal people and bring the game or performing rituals in which they invoke the spirits of ancestors and are possessed by (as they are still doing in hunter-gatherer societies today) seems unwarranted. You might find another term than "atheist" to describe that. And since scholars (Durkheim, Bellah, Elliade, etc.) don't seem to be using the term that way, you might explain why you are.

Come to think of it, there is one group that insists religion must include god, and that God was in it from the outset. That, of course, is the Evangelical Christians, following the theory Urmonotheismus (primeval monotheism) inroduced by the Scottish anthropologist Andrew Lang and carried forward by anthropologists (and priests) Fr. Wilhelm Schmdit and Kenyan Anglican theologian John Mbiti. They noticed that in many African and Native American societies, there was a concept of a transcendental Sky God, and argued that originally this was the universal religion from which people fell away. For a full evangelical exposition of this theory, see Norman Geisler, "Primitive Monotheism", Christian Apologetics Journal (Spring, 1998). Italian anthropoligist/historian Raffaele Pettazzoni devoted much of his professional life to refuting the theory, arguing that claim that the sky gods were merely a dim personification or of the physical sky. Anthropologist E.E. Pritchard reported that there was no universal pattern on this phenomenon. But I guess it's a possibility. Strange bedfellows for you.

Only beliefs in forces of a spiritual or supernatural origin and a sacred character.
Etc.

According to these scholars, it was a phenomenon that grew out of human encounters with the environment, so theoretically there was a time when some humans hadn't developed it yet. But we don't know when that was..

There you go again. It's not just me. It's me and most scholars.

Well there have certainly been lots of them since the eighteenth century.