One book I read back in high school talked about people who were in church to be “hatched, matched and dispatched”. This would seem to follow that tone.
I think, and Phil touched on this, that what people are saying when they say “Jesus was against religion” is that Jesus was against the buerocracy and secular power structure which become part of any organized religion over time. In time, “formal” faiths become power blocks in their own right, and some people benefit from them. The statement “Jesus was against religion” is wrong in the sense that any belief system IS a religion ( even athiests, usually)*, but the statement “Jesus was against organised religion, when the secular tennents of such religion are advocated to the detrement of the spiritual foundation” would be accurate. It’s not as much fun to shout in a grocery store, however.
- Anything can become your religion, if it forms the central theme of your belief system and character. Some people use sex as their religion, some money, others power. Most athiests I have met believe as viehemently that their is no God as Christians do in Jesus. As such, it forms the central focus of their world view, and they determine their behaviors based on that. Thus, it is a religion.
applauds madly That was awesomely worded!
If I didn’t know better, I’d say we’re in GD.
Not believing in a god is NOT a religion, damnit!
If you do not believe in Santa Claus, is that non-belief a religion? If you do not believe in Odin, is that non-belief a religion? The Tooth Fairy? The IPU? Superman?
I’m not playing a different version of the Religion Game. I’m not playing the Religion Game at all.
Czarcasm, I think you missed this part:
“Anything can become your religion, if it forms the central theme of your belief system and character.”
Which would be much aligned with the fourth definition of “religion” as given by Merriam Webester:
“4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”
If you’d like to argue the fact that the word “faith” is in there, and claim that your atheism is faith-less, then I hope you have fun, and I’d recommend singing “Ring Around the Rosies”, as its very fitting for the verbal circles we’d be running. However, no one here is saying that you are so closely aligned and identified with your atheism to the point where it is the central tenet to your daily life, or even has formed the slightest basis of your raison d’etre (French for “get your ass out of bed”).
Or, more precisely, “Jesus was opposed to the state of Judaism in first century Palestine, especially many of the specific ritualistic legal adaptations of the Pharasee movement, as well as what he saw as the overemphasis of the Saducees on litteral Torah interpretation.”
Most dictionaries will include a definition like #4 in their definitions of the word “religion”. Most dictionaries will also include such definitions as “one that is worshiped, idealized, or followed: Money was their god” or “a very handsome man” under their definition of the word god. I suppose if you want to play word games you could prove that, for a certain segment of the population, Brad Pitt is “a zero score in tennis”.
And I think that you have such a broad definition of “belief system” that you can claim that everyone has one.
Atheism is not a belief system. It is a realization that too many people have died for their “gods”. It is a realization that the term “God did it!” really means “I don’t know, so I’ll let this dogma do the thinking for me, instead of trying to find out for myself.” It is a realization that, throughout history, people tend to invent gods that are no better than they are.
It is a realization that life is too damn short, too damn sweet, and too damn important to waste time trying to 1. Guess which religion is the right one, 2. Guess which sect of the religion is following the right rules, 3. Follow all the myriad rules as confusing and sometimes self conradicting as they are, just for the vague promise of living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain when you die.
Even the most strident atheist isn’t playing the Religion Game. The most that can be said is that she or he is trying to show people that the Game is dangerous and no-one gets to win in this life, and the evidence for the next is nil.
Never said it was. But would you agree that people HAVE belief systems? Would you agree that there is a portion of atheists that have belief systems? If so, would you then agree that there is a portion of atheists where atheism is the CORE of that belief system?
That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying that all atheists are so wrapped up in being atheists, that atheism is the engine that drives them through the day. Based on your description of what atheism is to you (that you don’t have enough time to fuck with worrying about it), that this isn’t the case in your situation. Something that I never assumed.
MEBuckner: A bit of a stretch, don’t you think?
Well, this thread was originally started to discuss certain Christians who like to say “Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s just loving Jesus!” I consider that to be a fairly wide stretch, myself.
Some people have belief systems. Perhaps if you could tell me what you think some atheists have “faith” in, we could proceed. It’s not science, btw. We hard-core atheists will say “Show me!” to all aspects of science, just as we do to all religions. Science does tend to come up with the goods more often than not, but when it doesn’t, we’ll point that out.
We don’t have “faith” that there is no god or goddess-we are amazed that people will believe, with no evidence, what can only be described as a fairy tale on steroids.
If I tell you that I am the reincarnation of Lamont Cranston, and that I am currently the President of the United States, would your strong disbelief in my story be a “belief system”?
Slyth,
You argue pretty strongly for someone who dosn’t think about it. Kinda like a lot of Christians I know…
You obviously don’t believe in a God. That’s cool. But you base your reactions on that hardcore belief in no god. And by broad definition, that is a religion. Ease up on the “dirty” word religion. Science is some people’s religion. Yours is obviously a belief in nothing but yourself and what you can touch and experience. Just because MOST of the time a word has what is to you a negative conotation, dosen’t meant that it can not be correctly used in an different, even opposite connotation. Nobody is saying anything about how stupid and gullible you are, lighten up, admit the truth, and realize that words are shorthanded ways to express ideas, and as unpalatable as it may seem on the surface, athiesm is your religion. It’s called fighting ignorance and accepting that what is, is. NBD unless you make it one.
Munch
And how is it that Christianity is not a specific, institutionalized religion? If it’s not institutionalized, then what the fuck is with all those churches??
pldennison
I would agree with the fact that Jesus didn’t like the way things were. But was his solution to abolish religion? No; it was to abolish hypocrisy in practicing religion. He wanted to clean house, not to blow shit up.
Number Six
If Christianity ain’t an organized religion, I don’t know what is. Let me use the Christian friends I mentioned in my OP as an example. They belonged to an organized religion! Hell, half of them had the SAME goddamned BIBLE. I don’t care if they have a personal relationship with Jesus. The point I do care about is that they have a CHRISTIAN relationship with Jesus. If a person were to walk around, talking to Skribbinaker the Javelin Throwing Cookie, then I could agree that they don’t belong to an organized religion. Christianity just doesn’t fit the bill. (BTW, the “goddamned” in the thread title was a last-second addition; I thought it would be funny :))
Searching For Truth
SFT, if you don’t respect the Church as an institution, I suppose you’ve written your own Bible? What’s that, you haven’t? You’re accepting the word of a few councils 1700 years ago about what is divinely inspired and what ain’t? I’d call that a healthy dose of respect.
Weirddave
I don’t think that’s what people mean, though. I think they mean something along the lines of “Churches and rituals and all that jazz don’t mean shit.” While I think Jesus wouldn’t object to YOUR statement, I do note that he did a fair number of rituals. To put it another way, I think Jesus disliked the “detrements” in religion, but he never struck me as dismissing religion wholesale.
The more recent posts… can you keep the hijacking to a dull roar? Honestly, the “atheism is/isn’t a religion” has been done. Someone post some goddamned links already.
For the Christians out there: I’m not going to apologize if I offend you. Life’s tough, and not everyone is going to be all soft and cuddly. If you’ve got the stones, though, I’d like to see more of you post something along the lines of what Searching For Truth did in his first post in this thread. If you’ve ever said “I’m a Christian, but I’m not religious,” what the hell did you mean by that? To me, that’s akin to saying, “I have sex with a person of my same gender, but I’m not gay or anything.”
One final question: what in the name of Amitabha Buddha is so vile and reprehensible about saying that your religion is Christian? Why all the hemming and hawing? I gave my conjecture in the OP; correct me if I’m wrong.
Quix
There are apparently two definitions at work here. Religion often refers to a firm belief in a certain worldview and creation story, with a belief in some sort of spirituality or spiritual beings and an attendant morality. I would say that general philosophies/belief systems are excluded from this; I would not say that “existentialism is so-and-so’s religion” or “his religion is utilitarianism”. If you include general philosophies, everyone is religious, since everyone has some sort of philosophy they follow, even solipists. Just about everybody has something that is a central tenet of their life, something that gives them a reason to get out of bed. And if everyone is religious, then the need to differentiate between “religious” and “non-religous” is pretty moot.
Then there is a common colloquial association of “religion” with “something someone really cares an awful lot about.” So you say, “baseball is this guy’s religion”, “logic is this guy’s religion”, “republicanism is this guy’s religion” and so on. Republicanism is certainly a belief system, and one that certain people may hold to with ardor and faith, but I’d only call it a religion to anyone if I was being cutesy. If someone asks what religion you are, you do not reply, in all seriousness, “republican” or “logic”, no matter how much you like republicanism or logic as a belief system. So I think it’s a little shifty wordplay to claim that an belief system can be a religion if someone feels strongly about it; it’s a cute way to say “X is very important to this person”, but it is just a spinoff based on the fact that religion is often very important to people. It’s like MEBuckner pointed out, while you may say “money is x’s God”, you don’t really mean that he thinks money is the supreme perfect being, it’s just a cute way of saying X really likes money.
It could be their way of saying, “I’m not devout.” This is what I would mean. Or they could mean that while they believe, they don’t actively participate in their faith by going to church. Or they could be assuming that their listener equates “religious Christians” with “fundamentalists” and is trying to dissociate themselves from them. (And who wouldn’t want to do that, really?) I think that calling yourself a “non-religious Christian” is different than saying Christianity isn’t a religion.* The former is IMHO a comment on the person’s non-dogmaticness (non-dogmatism?), the latter just stupid.
*Next time you hear somebody say this, you should ask them, “Oh, you mean you’re in a cult then?” After all, if they’re fundamentalists, they’re not far off. 
Or maybe, as I have said, they are trying to diferentiate their belifs from the institution of “religion”. IMHO the former is fine, we all have one. The later is evil.
Surely you don’t mean that Christianity is a single organization. Christianity is a belief system whose core values are generally shared by a group of related religious organizations. Thus the Catholic Church, Baptist, Southern Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, Presbytarian, Church of England. Would you identify all of these as a single organization? Subsets of the same religion, yes (although many consider their Church the only true form of Christianity), all the same organization, no. There are people who identify themselves as Christian who nonetheless are not members of any church. Thus they are members of a religion (Christianity) without being members of any religious organization (church).
This reminds me of Humpty Dumpty’s line in Through the Looking Glass which was, as best I can remember:
“When I use a word, it means precisely what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.”
To throw my two cents worth in,
I tend to follow Jesus’ moral philosophy. Am I religious? No. Do I believe he said the things attributed to him? No. I hope that he said them. But it may be pure fiction. DO I believe there is a God? No. But I hope that there is one. But I have to have better proof than there has been so far. The question then is: If my moral philosophy is based on the teachings of what has been attributed to him, does that make me a “Christian?” Even if I don’t have faith he exsisted? If so, then there can be non-religious Christians.
Damn, I think I just confused myself. I hope you can understand what the hell I just said. 
Hey! I resemble those remarks!
X
It most certainly is not. It is the absence of belief in deities. Once can belong to a nontheistic religion.
I also would like to say for the record that Czarcasm does not speak for all atheists. Certainly he does not speak for me.