The Fate of Civil Religion | John Michael Greer
April 3, 2012 (Archdruid Report) -- To describe faith in progress as a religion, as Ive done in these essays numerous times, courts a good many misunderstandings.
The most basic of those comes out of the way that the word religion itself has been tossed around like a football in any number of modern societys rhetorical scrimmages. Thus its going to be necessary to begin by taking a closer look at the usage of that much-vexed term.
The great obstacle here is that so many people these days insist that religion is a specific thing with a specific definition. Now of course its all too common for the definition in question to be crafted to privilege the definers own beliefs and deliver a slap across the face of rivals; thats as true of religious people who want to define religion as something they have and other people dont as it is of atheists who want to insist that what they have isnt a religion no matter how much it looks like one. Still, theres a deeper issue involved here as well.
The word religion is a label for a category. That may seem like an excessively obvious statement, but it has implications that get missed surprisingly often. Categories are not, by and large, things that exist out there in the world. Theyre abstractions -- linguistically, culturally, and contextually specific abstractions -- that human minds use to sort out the disorder and diversity of experience into some kind of meaningful order. To define a category is simply to draw a mental boundary around certain things, as a way of stressing their similarities to one another and their differences from other things. To make the same point in a slightly different way, categories are tools, and a tool, as a tool, cant be true or false; it can only be more or less useful for a given job, and slight variations in a given tool can be useful to help it do that job more effectively.
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