It's still not clear to me how that implies I have a religion. Being influenced, consciously or subconsciously does not mean I have a religion, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different.
Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? Is expressed spoken belief the final decider? Or does action factor in too?
This is a really long-winded way of saying that what "religion" is defined as is constantly changing. The book I recommended explains it much better than I can.
Everything else is simply not "a religion." And I also have a whole book to cite:
https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Versus-Fact-Religion-Incompatib...
"Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible" by Jerry A. Coyne
"Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions."
Also, Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion
"Definition of religion
1a : the state of a religious (e.g. "a nun in her 20th year of religion")
1b(1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural
1b(2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith"
If you think "4" fits with the bad attempt to redefine the real meaning, it in to explain the use in the sentence like "rock'n'roll is his religion."
That makes sense only if you redefine "Christianity" to mean "respect for universal human rights". By that logic most everyone is a Christian. Most Hindus and Buddhists would be Christian too.
The problem is that changing the definition of a word does not change boundaries in reality. I can call my automobile a "Leaf", but that doesn't mean my car does photosynthesis. Similarly, you can say that Christianity just means "respect for human rights", but that doesn't mean that everyone accepts the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Today, in our global world, the same values absolutely have changed previously different cultures. Japan prior to 1946 doesn't have a universalist (formed in Christianity) democratic tradition, which was forced upon it by the West. India has a similar story with the caste system. It doesn't mean that they are Christians, but simply that ideas strongly formed by Christianity are now extremely powerful there.
"The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian.""
Where you effectively claim that "Christian religion" can be one where somebody is even one who doesn't believe in supernatural. Because... some other values count too?
Can really somebody who doesn't believe that Jesus is a "Christ" (the anointed one, a "Messiah", it's not a surname but the specific role in the universe of believers) be a Christian? And somebody who doesn't believe in any supernatural deity at all?
I for example admit I grew up in the area where traditionally most of the inhabitants were real Christian believers, but I surely am not a Christian. The Church would surely not accept that claim.
Edit: user keiferski answers below that to him "it's unclear what "supernatural" means in this context." Let me write that even more clearly: I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural deity, i.e. one which can influence the events on Earth that occur among humans or one which can "change the rules" how the universe functions, as established by the scientific experiments and research. I also define the belief in life after death as a belief in supernatural, and I assert that I don't have that belief. Also, the area I grew up was never inhabited by majority of "protestants." I was also never in life an object of any religious ceremony (and I consider myself lucky for growing up in such an environment, learning how most of people in the U.S. live). Most of the people I know who were baptized as children later officially renounced the Church, and the Church wiped them out of its records. All of them never went to any religious school, just state schools (some of them had a subject where they explicitly learned about religion though). People I knew who already died don't have any religious sign on their graves, and didn't believe they will "live" after their death. People who live together with their partners and even have children didn't even officially register in the state institutions, and they even less had any ceremony in any church. It's not "complicated" at all. And I'm not even some special exception -- exactly because not every area in the western world functions like an average "contemporary American" would expect. What is that that those people in my environment and I "do" which you believe could make us "Christians" then? (I also admit I know a few people in the circle of people around me, a very small minority, who do say they believe in Jesus Christ and that they have Christian morale, and attempt to behave according to that, while also not being consistent though their life. But they are a minority, and like I've said, even they don't "do" consistently what "the religion" would "expect" from them).
Nevertheless, even having that "ethic" doesn't make one a believer in supernatural "messiah" properties of a person called Jesus or in the afterlife or expected punishment or reward then or in the mere existence of some almighty supernatural entity with any capability which conflicts with scientific knowledge.
To quote user keiferski from another post: "to say that the contemporary American definition is all that counts is a bit historically ignorant."
We're trying to explain that coming from an entire culture and moral tradition means that you can decide God isn't real and you're still mostly flavored by that culture and moral tradition. The real-ness of God is just a little detail.
One can see this in the many analogues from specifically Christian traditions like repentance, confession and original sin to the current Social Justice movement. God not required.
With Christianity, for example, the history there is immensely complicated. There are perhaps an infinite number of interpretations of Jesus' teachings and actions, many of which place far less focus on belief than on works (actions.) Other groups don't care whatsoever what any organized church says and base their beliefs and actions on traditions or on the Bible itself. Paul, the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and innumerable others have shaped "Christianity" over the last two thousand years, so to say that the contemporary American definition is all that counts is a bit historically ignorant.
Beyond that, it's also unclear precisely what "supernatural" means in this context.
In sum: it's complicated.
Most who claim "respect for universal human rights" as their motto actually have a belief system that's heavily influenced by specifically Western sources. When the rubber meets the road, their biases, blind spots and points of emphasis will reveal this.
Someone from a different cultural tradition will have a different set of biases while still believing in "universal human rights". Up to and including which rights are more important when they come into conflict.
But that doesn't mean I practice or believe in a religion or deity?
Idk, this argument seems pretty facile and I've spent a lot of time reading philosophy of religion.
I'm not arguing that this is absolutely the case, but simply that it seems extremely plausible to me.
We can expand the definition of religion to include those sets of cultural values, but then I worry that:
a. the word religion loses meaning
b. someone who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim? Even if they weren't one to start with? That seems absurd to me.
b. That's more of a sociological labeling question, but I don't think that's a good example.
That's dodging the issue, which is that if you are going to argue that secular humaninsm is identical with christianity, then logically, you must accept that christianity is identical with secular humanism: No God, no creation, no Trinity, Christ is not the son of God in any sense... and if you do, then all the explicitly theological and christian concepts can be stripped out with Occam's razor.
And not that it's particularly definitive, but I'd note that cult and culture share the same Latin etymology.
"Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals."
I've already read it. I agree that there are implicit religious values, perhaps even pseudo-religious, I disagree that it is an actual "religion" as such.
Nor do I particularly subscribe to American civil religion itself.
No, according to GP, insofar as that person believes in the sanctity of the individual and human rights etc, that person was Christian all along, no matter their belief in the resurrection of Jesus, or what they think their religion is.
A thesis I disagree with.
Frankly, I find these redefinitions of common words somewhat annoying, as eg. in one of the earlier talks of Jordan Peterson with Sam Harris, where Peterson insisted on defining "truth" as "that which confers long-term evolutionary advantage". No, that's not what truth is. Just invent a new word for it.
Similarly, one can easily say that today's Western secular societies hold many values dear that arguably arose in Christianity (see, I just did!), without then adding that those secular societies are not, in fact, secular, but religious.
> If your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean?
Nothing more than that human thought and behavior is not a consistent logical system, let alone a sound one. As there is no reason to think that it is, this is not problematical, and there's nothing theological to see here.
Both sides of that claim are fantastically false. First, while most describe the Enlightenment as novel, almost noone describes it arising ex nihilo rather than as a product of preexisting social forces, both building on and reacting against things present in its immediate context.
Second, while obviously it arose in a largely Christian context, there were significant non-Christian influences, and particularly the repopularization of pre-Christian influence (in part from interaction with contemporary non-Christian cultures) played a significant role in the Renaissance which itself set the stage for the Enlightenment.
> For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context.
Much of our idea of human rights is a reaction against the practices on all sides of the divides within Western Christendom.
> Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different.
Sure, social evolution is path dependent. And if we adopted a cladistic taxonomy of belief systems, those stemming from the Enlightenment might usefully described as being subsets of "Christianity" because of their origin. But while cladistic taxonomy makes some sense for biological life, it really doesn't make sense for social movements.
> Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean?
It probably means that you and the people who think your "values and actions" make you part of X have radically different definitions of "X", and are essentially speaking different languages on that point.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Yes there is
This kind of logic doesn't transfer well to other beliefs. God is omni-present, omni-powerful and all-knowing. Transferring the same logic, we assume people worshipping God always feel distant, powerless and knowing nothing.