Linguists have since studied the problem of how humans generate semantic categories, and what it seems to be is that we use prototypes. Poker is a game, target shooting is a game, Scrabble is a game… and things that are like them are games.

This leads into your point #2. The top dozen or so “major world religions” are undeniably religions… and things that are like them are also religions.

Whether or not it identifies anything probably doesn’t matter. Humans are very good at placing things into categories which add no value. I’m reminded of the famous example from Jorge Luis Borges about how animals were supposedly categorised in a Chinese encyclopedia. Humans are pattern recognition machines. We see patterns even where there is no underlying pattern. And I guess this is your point.

I agree with your third point, but with reservations. People like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong have identified a huge number of similarities between religions. I don’t think we can discard that out of hand.

(Incientally, the borderline cases that I was thinking of are things like cults of personality, or certain types of political movement.)

Love “disoccidenting”. May reuse it, with acknowledgement.

Question: what do you make of the terminology ‘faith communities’, now much more in vogue? Is it another attempt to define non-Christian people in Christian terms (because it’s a very Christian thing to focus on “faith”)? Does it presuppose the whole set of intra-Christian conversations/debates about “faith and reason” & attempt to relocate them in a multi-religious [oops, there I go] context? Or what? Why have people started talking about “faith” instead of “religion”? And is it any better? (At least it’s blatantly theological. Except that it’s used in a way that cuts off its theological roots).

A comment on “worldviews” – I have a stock explanation of “theology”, for use in worldview-mixed company e.g. on university open days: “theology is reasoning about God; Luther says your god is whatever you worship; we could interpret “worship” as e.g. “accord ultimate importance to, organise your life around, see as the definition and source of good [etc]“; on that basis, theology is critical and constructive reasoning about what people accord ultimate importance to [etc]“. I am never quite convinced by it myself (and in order to be honest I have to go on and say “and what we do here under “theology” is study a particular tradition of reasoning-about-what-people-worship”). But I do it to try to break through some assumptions about the scope and nature of both “religion” and theology, and it may come somewhere close to the idea of worldviews, suggested above (“commitment about the basic constitution of reality”).

For myself, I got the idea from Nicholas Lash – which rather reveals where I’m coming from on this issue.

Contra the sociological categorization, I don’t see any set of criteria that would make, say, Christianity, Animism, Mormonism, and Buddhism all different types of one entity (religions) but would at the same time exclude from that category being extremely devoted to the Chicago Cubs. It seems to me that Steve is exactly right on this point, and the idea of ‘religion’ is a bad one. However, the concept of worldview *does* have criteria that would make Christianity, Buddhism, etc. all species of the same genus but at the same time would exclude extreme sports fanaticism (or at least reduce it to some version of a paganistic worldview!).

So then what makes a worldview- what are the criteria? Vaguely and from the hip, a worldview answers questions like “what is reality?”, “what is humanity?”, “what is the nature of the world around us?”. It is a commitment about the basic constitution of reality the provides the foundation on which we live.

If its such a flawed notion, why was the concept of ‘religion’ developed, and why is it alive and well today? That’s a very difficult question to answer (although I think Steve is off to a good start), but I might at least suggest this: Naturalism is not a religion on most every definition of ‘religion’, but it is undeniably a worldview. It seems to me that the concept of ‘religion’ was birthed and raised in the ethos of Naturalism- perhaps it was in part, even subconsciously, designed to provide Naturalism a subtle and unfair means of sequestering competing worldviews to a category of lower credibility or legitimacy?

An alternative category? I suspect that there is, but that it is tradition-specific. That is, I could in theory construct an account of human social realities from a Christian (or perhaps even more narrowly from a Baptist/Reformed) perspective, and this account would include a set of categories into which I placed the particular social realities we name as Islam, etc. But my Jewish – perhaps even my Roman Catholic – friend would have to do something different, and might well end up with different categories and/or different placements of the particular items.

If religion is an empty word, as you suggest (and I will need to reflect further on this), is there not some alternative category that could apply, or am I being too Aristotelian?

Wittgenstein pointed out that exactly the same thing can be said about the word “game”. There is no feature or set of features that all games have in common that all non-games don’t have. Card games, board games, the Olympic games, war games and mind games have very little in common. And yet, apart from the inevitable borderline cases, we’re pretty good at classifying everything in the world into the categories “game” and “non-game”.