Comment by pfannkuchen
4 hours ago
The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
It's a strange christian sect that is generally atheistic but borrows values from the western tradition.
That's nothing to do with religion. It's just having values. You can have values without religion.
> it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?
People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.
People who don’t believe it are bad.
If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.
People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.
People think we should spread it to other people.
Functionally, how is that different from religion?
Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.