Comment by GS523523
9 hours ago
> To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
Religion = blind loyalty (to those in power of said religion)
It's one of the oldest tools we have to control society. And it gets abused. All. Of. The. Time.
That's better, but it's still wrong, because there are plenty of organized belief systems whose leaders don't demand blind loyalty. To say that these don't qualify as religions is absurd.
You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which case the comment has lost its meaning.
I'd actually go a step further: even science and scientific method require a sort of "faith" that the underlying assumptions (axioms of formal logic and algebra at the very least) are true.
The core difference is that science invites questioning those unprovable assumptions, whereas religion usually does not (and sometimes forbids it as part of the canon).
better word is dogma