• Church youth leader sentenced to 13 years in prison for sexual abuse of young girls
(archived link)
• Catholic nun among 25 arrested in mob bust in northern Italy
(archived link)
• Member of secretive Christian sect sentenced to 120 years in prison; part of widespread child sexual abuse and subsequent coverup
(archived link)
• Oklahoma deputies arrest former pastor accused of lewd or indecent acts to a child
(archived link)
• Oklahoma pastor sentenced to 25 years in prison for lewd acts, rape of underage girls (not the same Oklahoma pastor as previous headline)
(archived link)
• Retired New Orleans priest pleads guilty to kidnapping and raping boy in 1970s
• Texas pastor accused of secretly recording visitors, downloading child porn
(archived link)
When boiled down, religions are essentially just a way of coping with the unknowable. The exact specifics of our origin, what happens to the thing we call "ourselves" after death, and usually an idea of how to be a better person. These themes are pretty consistent across everything we'd colloquial agree is a "religion".
The issues only really arise when someone insists that these unknowable, unquantifiable things that they believe in MUST be the only way, and anyone who doesn't believe the same way is somehow a threat. I believe that ones beliefs with regard to these unknowable things are deeply personal. They're arrived at by understanding one's self, and a LOT of introspection. It'd be weird if any two people managed to arrive at an agreement on everything, and that's okay because the beliefs are built on internal factors rather than external.
Organized religion, then, is bullshit, yeah. Anyone pushing answers for questions unanswerable is pushing an agenda. I doubt anything approaching the level of group think that is modern abrahamic religions could ever exist without some kind of power struggle.
A story about something you never saw, received tenth-hand via a morass of scholars and politicians. Yes, let's analyze it. Ugh.
What about Trumpism? That's a religion, and it doesn't deal in any of those three questions.
That's really more a cult than a religion. As much as "hahah all religions are cults LoL", there is a distinct difference between them.
Drag isn't a sociologist, but drag is pretty sure the set of cults is contained within the set of religions.
Right. All cults are, ostensibly, religions. That doesn't mean that it works in the other way. Not all religions are cults.
Right, so if Trumpism is a cult, it must be a religion. And it's a religion that isn't concerned with the creation of the universe, the afterlife, or how to live well. So your definition of religion based on it answering unknowns can't be right.
There's a reason I said "ostensibly". Cults co-opt the religious umbrella in order to manipulate. They rely on the same kinds of psychology that religions do, often touch on the same kinds of topics. Trumpism is more a cult of personality than a proper religious cult.
Either way, to equate any kind of spiritually and religion with one of the most obvious examples of someone heading a cult is at BEST disingenuous. I'm not here to talk about cults. Cults suck, they're the opposite of what I described earlier. Intensely external, entirely about control.
Trumpism definitely has the worship and belief in the supernatural, insofar as most religions do. Drag thinks it's a religion.
That's fine. Drag can believe it to be a religion. Still not one relevant at all to the views I stated above.
Okay well since we couldn't agree on a definition that encompasses all religions, drag is going to continue believing there's no such thing as religion.
That's fine. Any effort to perfectly categorize everything based on some kind of ruleset tends to fail. Most real world things don't really fall neatly into boxes like we want them to. Looking at species and gender as the two obvious examples.
We have yet to settle on an actual definition for "species" that works in every case. It was originally "can produce reproductively viable offspring" but a myriad of species break this rule. Then there's dogs. Every pet dog belongs to the species Canis Familiaris. It takes one look at a beagle and a great dane, for instance, to see where that doesn't exactly feel right.
Gender (or sex, even) is another example where categorization fails. For the longest time, we had two of each, and anything else was aberrant. Then we saw that there were enough odd cases that a third "intersex" category was added and wildly accepted. Today, we see so many different expressions of gender and sex that the categories of "male" and "female" have largely lost the meaning they have. They're just not useful descriptors of what we actually see.
Almost every attempt at categorization will end up with edge cases where we just have to make an arbitrary distinction. If you want that to be the nail in the coffin to say "religion's don't exist" then fine. Neither do music genres. Gender. Species. Or we can have an actual discussion on these topics, settle on a functional meaning for this conversation (as I tried to do multiple times) and actually exchange ideas, learn, and grow.
Genre, gender, and species don't exist either, but there are uses to pretending they do. There's actually a use to pretending religion exists too. It's to prevent religious discrimination. Protecting beliefs from persecution is the reason to keep the idea of religion around.
This post isn't quite in the spirit of that goal, though, so drag thinks OP shouldn't be allowed to have a definition of religion. Only people who aren't going to use the idea to do harm should have it. As far as antitheists are concerned, religion doesn't exist.