Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
...I think the real difference in what we are saying is that you think the cause of the atheism is the real defining metric, where as I think the result is equally as defining. In some ways, the influence of a strong atheist thought process is the same as a strong religious belief. The way you define it, then absolutely not, atheism is not a religion. I think if you look at the bigger picture though, that line blurs.
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In my reading of this thread, I can't help but conclude that so much of the issue stems from how "religion" has been defined in the past, and how it continues to be re-defined over the course of time.
At the time in which Christianity and modern Judaism emerged, "religion" was best understood as activity by which practitioners sought to curry favour with the gods. It was not compartmentalized and anthropologically distinguished from other parts of day-to-day life, as appeal to the divine practically permeated all of life. There were no real religiously motivated conflicts, because people almost universally agreed upon the existence of the gods, and the importance of their regular consultation and placation.
Christianity effectively changed this mindset in its insistence first, on the exclusivity of Jesus and the God of the Jews, and second, on the assent to a set of beliefs, or a "creed". Both of these unusual developments were exceptionally threatening to the Roman Empire, and the conflict that this created resulted in an explosion of Christianity in the empirical age. Religion, in the course of the first several centuries of the common era, came to take on a much more epistemological dimension, and was more and more defined according to conceptual matters than real actions—"orthodoxy" came to supplant "orthopraxis".
The Protestant Reformation that emerged from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment only served to exacerbate this distinction. In the present climate, it seems that "religion" has been effectively neutered, and constricted precisely to the importance of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. I think this is a testament to the exaggerated emphasis that we have gradually assigned to matters of the mind, and the promise of intellect and knowledge to shape our world. So long as "religion" is predominantly an intellectual matter, then critics will continue to insist upon the position of non-belief as a religious one. It's wrong, but the problem is one that Western religions basically created, and are now under great pains to practically apply in the modern world.