Katatori-kun said:
This is absurd hair-splitting. You're trying to propose that if 200 people go to a shrine and do the exact same things, they belong in two entirely different categories based on the western-obsessed concept of faith. According to you, some of them are engaging in religion, and some of them are engaging in a cultural practice, even though their actions are 100% the same.
Quite so. There's more to the world than that which is observable with the naked eye.
What I'm proposing is that there is a difference that the human mind is able to recognize between, for example, Jews that believe in God and Jews that don't believe in God. Namely whether they believe in a god or not.
That there is a difference should be self evident. If there wasn't, I couldn't have formed those last sentences.
What happens when, as thoughts can be fleeting and shifty things, in the middle of the act of worship someone changes their faith? It happens all the time. A person momentarily doubts that whatever the tenets of their religion are, are true. Or the reverse, a person who doesn't really believe momentarily gets caught up in the pageantry or fervor of the group and for a few seconds does have faith. Do they suddenly switch categories, only to switch back when their mind changes?
I'd say that's up for discussion. For now, I'd leave that to the person categorizing.
In my personal opinion, they had a spiritual experience; a momentary insight into the mindset of a person from the other category. Whether this convinces them that whatever truth claims the religion in question makes about the universe are correct and they keep this belief after the experience is over or not, for me makes the difference between someone who became religious on accout of a spiritual experience and someone who simply had a spiritual experience.
i.e. I personally see spiritual experiences as something different from gaining religion for a moment, but others might not agree. Some might say the changed categories for a moment. That isn't really problematic. There are no rules stating a person have to belong to a category for a minimum amount of time every time they change categories.
And making this more absurd is that you've invented categories that can never be populated because they depend on observations that no objective party can ever make.
They're as easy to populate as the categories of "People who have eaten a lizard in the past" and "People who haven't eaten a lizard in the past". That is to say: not very. At least until science comes up with a brain-scan machine advanced enough to tell when someone's lying.
Just because the categories aren't based in a tangible matter like rituals, this doesn't mean they are invalid. Would you propose you couldn't separate the world into "People who like country music" and "People who don't like country music"? It certainly isn't an easy job, and some people will probably be placed in the wrong category on account of lies or similar; but in the end, you just have to take what people say about what goes on inside their heads on good faith.
Until science invents a brain-scan machine advanced enough to tell whether a person has faith or not (or likes country music), that is.
Consider in a Christian church, a person who swears they fervently believe not because they actually have faith but because they want to fit in with the group. According to your categorization system, a system you invented just to support your argument that all religions require faith, we can never accurately categorize this person's behavior.
We certainly can, but it depends on whether we know this person is lying or not.
The fact that it's possible to fool the one attempting to categorize does not make the categories less valid.
A woman can pass off herself as a man, but that doesn't make her any less a woman by the definition that goes by physical/physiological properties of the body (In fact, if you're of the kind which is often found in transgender discussions, believing one's gender to not be determined by the physical properties of ones' body, the religious v. not religious and man v. woman questions are fairly analogous.)
I would also like to clarify that I have not attempted to argue that all religions require faith. That completely depends on how you're defining religion in the context of the particular discussion you are having. Like I said earlier, I recognize that using the word 'religion' to denote cultural practices as well as faith is useful when you're studying the effects a religion has in a society for example.
The argument that I'm making is that in the average laymen's discussion, the definition of religion that should be "in play" is the one I'm explaining, unless a different definition is specified as the relevant one, implicitly or explicitly.
The word 'religion' can be used in many ways and can mean many things, so jumping into a discussion and saying "your argument against religion is flawed because religion can also mean [x] which your argument does not consider" is faulty, because it is implied that a different use of the word which does not incorporate [x] is currently in play.
I'm saying that the standard definition used in a laymen's discussion should be the one I'm using unless otherwise is implied.
What about agnostics? If an agnostic person engages in religious ritual every week, devoutly follows every rule of their religion, but when asked if there is a God says, "Well, I think so. I mean, I'd like there to be one. But we'll never know for sure," does that suddenly shift everything they've ever done out of the religious category to the cultural practice category?
Agnostics are what agnostics are: a sort of gray area between religious and not religious. They can of course lean towards either side of the spectrum.
The way I see the person in your example, they have faith, but they don't consider their faith a great authority on the nature of the universe.
It also seems there's a slight misunderstanding here. I do not aim to categorize their
actions as either cultural or religious.
I see the faith as the religion, and the rituals as the cultural actions assosciated with the religion (the orthopraxy). i.e. The actions are cultural regardless of what the person performing them believes. Some people practice this culture to express their religion and some people practice the culture simply as culture; secularly. By virtue of this see a person as either religious (someone who subscribes to the truth claims of the universe that these actions sprung from) or as a non-religious practitioner of a culture (someone who doesn't believe these truth claims, but practices the culture that sprung from them).
You could very well call the latter ones, say, Buddhists, but in the context of a laymen's discussion you would have to specify that they are purely-orthopraxic Buddhists. Whether these people count as religious or not depends entirely on what is practical for the purposes of the debate at hand. Whether you choose to consider these people as religious in your daily life is up to you, so long as you, in a given debate, take care to use the definition of a religious person that is currently in use.
I promise you, every person who has ever claimed to have faith has wavered at some point in their lives. Every person who has claimed not to have faith has made decisions based on unknowable things they believe in. Our minds are fluid and changing. Trying to categorize the nature of someone's activity based on a fleeting mental state is ridiculous.
The fact that one of my buddies who doesn't ordinarily like country music at some point listened to a country song and thought "this isn't so bad", doesn't mean it isn't practical to have a list of which ones of my buddies not to play country music around.
Under your definition, the only religion that exists then is Christianity. Even then, it only exists temporarily in the minds of certain practitioners. I hope I don't need to elaborate in order to demonstrate the bias inherent in such a claim.
"Under my definition, the only life-view where every cultural practitioner is also religious is Christianity." is what I'd change what you wrote to, to more closely represent the particular definition of religion that I'm talking about.
I wouldn't agree though, since I myself might be called an orthopraxic Christian (I'm not religious, in case there was any doubt). I celebrate easter and christmas and the pentecost and whatnot, and I occasionally go to church.
Of course, Christians won't let you identify with them if you don't state that you believe in The holy trinity, but this doesn't matter much to an outside observer who (for the purposes of some debate or study, I guess) merely seeks to place all the people practicing Christian culture into one category.
