X-Message-Number: 22206 Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 23:29:07 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Religion Going back to Keith Henson, #22186: >I strongly suggest that anyone who is interested in either defending >against religion or making one up should get a copy of Pascal Boyer's >_Religion Explained I obtained the book recently and started reading. It is definitely worth reading, I'd say, though certainly not perfect. The book says, as has been noted, religion "is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and agencies" (p. 8), and "is made up of a limited catalogue of possible supernatural beliefs" (p. 11). The Beit-Hallahmi review which has been cited also says, by way of agreement, "religion is a collection of fantasies about spirits." If all this is true, then there would be no rightful place for anything you could call a religion in the thinking of many people, including myself. But I don't see it that way, and it brings up the issue of how one should define "religion." Opinions vary. Some definitions insist on a tie-in with beliefs in the supernatural or "fantasies about spirits," but I think that misses the point, and I am not alone. You can see what I mean by doing a Google search on "definition of religion." A definition of my own that reflects this different and (to me) more enlightened and positive view is as follows. "A religion is a body of attitudes, beliefs, and practices whose intended purpose is a meaningful engagement with what can reasonably be regarded as having transcendent or ultimate significance." I won't say this is unobjectionable. Refinements and/or explication seem in order, though I will have to hold off for now. But I think it does capture what "religion" is reasonably about, in a way that avoids any necessary belief in the supernatural. To close quickly, I think modern, scientific immortalism opens new, exciting possibilities in the field of non-supernatural religion, and that is one of the major themes I am trying to develop in the forthcoming book on Venturism. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22206