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Whipping out an old religious studies paper (oh! excuse me, miss. I didn't mean to hit your cheek) I copy and pasted my definition of religion.
"Religion may be defined in a two-pronged statement which encourages thorough examination and the broadest range of interpretive action within reason (i.e. not too specific, not too broad). Firstly, an expansion of William James’s [a famous psychologist and scholar of religion] definition of religion represents one aspect of the answer to this question. At the personal level, Religion is the processes of thinking, feeling, and acting of an individual in relation to what they consider divine, sacred, and Real. Conversely, religion has a political and sociological element. More specifically, religion is also a social construct or organization that instructs, upholds, sanctifies, controls, grooms, and limits the subjective beliefs of masses of individuals who experience religion at the aforementioned subjective level (this is the aspect of religion in which we find the production of artifacts, recorded incidences of ritual, and the development of techniques of spiritual conquest and investigation). If we tease out this logic, it can be said that religion is also the complex that emerges between the subjective creativity and assessment of the individual experience balanced against the limiting and structured sociological and political formations.
This distinguishes several aspects of religion: 1) the religious experience (i.e. the personal processes). 2) The religious situation: the environments, institutions, cannons, and formalized “realities.” 3) The conflict between these two elements.
We may also add: 4) the conflicts and concordances of the individual religious experience and religious situation with the social, political, and physical environments outside the limits of what is considered religion."
So yeah its a religion, if we define religion in terms of personal belief and political bodies. Its broad enough a definition to include Scientology and a hoary host of other strange little cults, yet broad enough to include systems of belief that do not claim to be religious: magic or some forms Buddhist practice for example. |
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