Quote:
JimMorrison said:
So there is potentially a religion in New Guinea that not seek to spread itself to willing minds to survive?  That would rock my entire concept of what the term religion actually means, as opposed to philosophy or just plain reasoning. 
I think in a nutshell Badger was simply stating that people are people, and religion didn't change anything intrinsic about our properties as organisms.
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HoneyBadger said explicitly, "Religion-and by this I mean the People of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is like a virus of ideas and ideals." It's explicitly not applicable to our hypothetical weird little religion (it is not, hypothetically, that of the People of the Book).
Anyway, if you equate "religion" = "meme" you are missing out IMHO on some of the richer meaning of the word. I'd probably define it differently, something like: "Religion is that which a person implicitly or explicitly holds to be true independent of social consensus of its truthfulness." From this standpoint, "Jesus was divine" and "humans have a responsibility to conserve resources for other animals" are both religious beliefs for certain people because they are not (easily) subject to disproof or argument from other people. They're simply fundamental to that person's worldview. Note that this definition diverges starkly from the traditional view that "religion is any belief which has something to do with God," but I think it's a nicer, more fundamental definition.
-Max