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Comment by denverkarma | Hacker News Reader

It would be fascinating to see a meta study that ignores the traditional definition of organized religion and instead looks at “religious” characteristics. What are the behaviors that make Buddhism and Islam both religions?

Beliefs that a person holds deeply, holds on faith without requiring proof, bases their life choices on, and evangelizes as the truth.

By that measure, aetheist San Francisco is the most religious place I’ve ever lived. The religions focus on the right way living or eating, and the evangelism is off the charts.

I would argue that the younger generation isn’t significantly less religious, but rather that they’re all inventing new religions or following scattered and informal tribes online. It’s like a new philosophical primordial soup from which I suspect we will see organized and “formal” religions emerge given sufficient time.

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> By that measure, aetheist San Francisco is the most religious place I’ve ever lived

You've constructed a loose definition of religion that approximates the common definition of culture. The term "religion" is generally reserved for "claims to relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements" [1]. (That said, "there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.")

A better term for the behavior you describe might be "zealotry."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

I consider a lot of the arguments that come out of modern hype movements to be based on near supernatural reaches of selective logic and rationalization.

Also, I think that while parsing religion from culture would be a handy classification, they don’t really decouple that easy.

> near supernatural reaches of selective logic and rationalization

Near is not at. Conspiracy theorists aren't religious. They're just zealous. People become zealous about many things. What differentiates religion is the explicit invocation of supernatural causes. That delineation is meaningful, to the person making the claim as well as in society's treatment of the claim. (Particularly in the United States, where the Constitution treats religious zeal differently from secular zeal.)

> By that measure, aetheist[sic] San Francisco is the most religious place I’ve ever lived. The religions focus on the right way living or eating, and the evangelism is off the charts.

This should be a clue that your "measure" is a bad one.

When you use the word "religious" loosely like this, broader than "supernatural spirituality", I've noticed that it tends to make a certain set of people quite cross with you. It seems to violate the dogma of some very religious (broad sense) people who reject supernatural spirituality and therefore reject being called religious narrow sense. These people respond poorly to being called religious.

I think you're right. But it can be difficult to discuss the topic without either walking on eggshells or throwing caution to the wind and making people upset.

That seems to be borne out when a few minutes on the front page gets the article flagged.

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