America’s New Religions

I think the methodology is broken here. If we start to extend the notion of religion to be able to mark any world view as a religious one, than what a point to have a notion of a religion? With such a methodology religion becomes unfalsifiable by means of Popper, so it have zero value as an idea.

In particular they tend to name any belief as a religious one. So if I believe in the power of progress, then I have a religious belief therefore I'm religious. But not every belief is religious, some are very rational and based on evidence.

What I cannot comprehend is why? Why people do it and for what reason? Why they want to believe that everyone bears religion? They want it so much that they are ready to turn inside out the notion of religion, which seems very important for them. They are ready to make the notion of religion to become meaningless this way. Why?

I have a hypothesis for it. Those thinkers just know nothing about science, methodology and rationality, and they are making their best trying to wrap a very big and complex world into something they understand. It happens that they understand nothing but religion, so all the world for them becomes religious.

Somehow this author completely skipped philosophy 101... nihilism is an often observed point of view in atheism: There is no existential meaning or commonly shared human need to appeal to a universal, unprovable truth. The only meaning that exists in life is the meaning people assign to it.

The premise of this book is flawed. Humans are not meaning seeking, humans are meaning assigning. Most of the time, the meaning we assign are logical and reflect reality. Sometimes the means we assign are internally consistent, but do not match reality. And occasionally, we come up with some pure crap. This occurs at both the individual and the cultural levels.