You said: I would say that according to some definitions, "religion" has pretty much disappeared (effectively) for more than half the world today.
I would say that according to some definitions, "religion" has pretty much disappeared (effectively) for more than half the world today. Europeans take their religion lightly and most ignore the traditions, and more and more Americans (both North and South) are coming to be similar.
In much of the rest of the world the religion listed in the reference books is not really a religion, for one reason or another. For example in much of Africa, including the Muslim and Christian parts, it is more magic than religion: ways to get God to do what you want. This happens in animism and Hinduism and many flavors of Buddhism and other Chinese religions, where you don't have "God," but "Heaven." I dunno, is it okay to call belief in spirits inhabiting a local forest glen and giving these spirits a greeting when you come into it a real "religion?"
We have instincts that lead to expression via religion, such as our submission/dominance instincts, our altruistic instincts, our ability to love and to experience awe and of course our instinct to try to survive, leading to beliefs trying to avoid the reality of death, but none of these can be said to be explicitly a religion instinct. They are just instincts that sometimes find religious ways to come out.
Claude responded: These are rich observations that touch on some genuinely contested territory in the study of religion.
These are rich observations that touch on some genuinely contested territory in the study of religion. Let me push back a little in places and affirm in others.
On the "disappearance" of religion
You're right that institutional religion has declined sharply in the West, but scholars like Grace Davie distinguish between "believing and belonging" — many Europeans who never attend church still hold vague beliefs in something transcendent, fate, karma, or life after death. They've exited the institution but not the underlying impulse. Whether that counts as "religion" depends entirely on your definition, which is exactly your point.
On magic vs. religion
This is a very old distinction — Frazer, Durkheim, and Malinowski all wrestled with it. The traditional academic split is that magic tries to compel or manipulate supernatural forces, while religion submits to them. But in practice, the line is almost impossible to draw cleanly. Catholic prayers to saints for specific favors, evangelical "prosperity gospel," and Hindu puja offerings all blend the two. The manipulation/submission spectrum is probably more honest than a binary.
On spirits in the forest glen
This is actually a central debate. Tylor in the 19th century called animism the oldest form of religion — the attribution of spiritual life to natural phenomena. Most contemporary anthropologists would say yes, absolutely call it religion, because it involves a cosmology, moral obligations to non-human agents, and ritual behavior. Dismissing it as "not really religion" risks measuring everything against Abrahamic institutional forms as the gold standard.
On the instinct question — this is where I'd push back hardest
You're right that there's no discrete "religion instinct." But the framing of instincts finding religious expression may be backwards, or at least incomplete. What cognitive scientists of religion like Pascal Boyer and Harvey Whitehouse argue is that religion isn't a byproduct of general instincts — rather, specific cognitive mechanisms are unusually well-suited to generating religious content: our hyperactive agency detection (seeing intention everywhere), our intuitive mind-body dualism (which makes souls feel natural), our coalitional psychology (us vs. them, purity, loyalty). These aren't general instincts repurposed — they're cognitive tools that almost inevitably generate religious-like outputs in social settings.
The definitional problem underneath everything
What you're really circling is that "religion" may be a concept that doesn't carve nature at its joints. Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued decades ago that we should abandon the noun "religion" entirely in favor of asking about faith (personal) and tradition (cumulative cultural inheritance). That framing handles your spectrum much more gracefully — from the forest-spirit greeting to Vatican theology — without having to decide what "counts."
You said: Yea, my sense of what "religion" is needs deities and priests and organization and sacrifices and rituals.
Yea, my sense of what "religion" is needs deities and priests and organization and sacrifices and rituals. Quiet belief in things beyond ourselves that don't demand more than, say, compassion, or in an afterlife, just doesn't quite fit. That is plainly too narrow.
Claude responded: Yes, and it's worth noticing where your definition comes from — it's essentially a portrait of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religious world.
Yes, and it's worth noticing where your definition comes from — it's essentially a portrait of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religious world. Deities, priests, temples, sacrifice, ritual — that's Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Abrahamic traditions that grew out of that soil. It's a remarkably coherent package, but it's a regional and historical accident that it became the template by which everything else gets measured.
The interesting thing is that even within that tradition the package keeps dissolving at the edges. The Hebrew prophets were frequently contemptuous of ritual and sacrifice — Amos and Isaiah essentially say God is nauseated by your offerings if your behavior is unjust. The Quakers eliminated priests and nearly all ritual. Certain strands of Reform Judaism are almost indistinguishable from ethical humanism with cultural memory attached. Buddhism in its early Pali canon form has no creator deity and is deeply skeptical of ritual. And yet we call all of these "religion" without much hesitation.
So the hard question your narrower definition raises is: what is the function the whole package is serving? Because if you can identify that, then you can ask whether something serves the same function without having the same furniture.
Durkheim's answer was that religion's core function is binding a community together around shared sacred things — the "church" (in his broad sense) being as essential as the belief. That would actually support your instinct that quiet private belief doesn't quite qualify, not because it lacks deities, but because it lacks the collective, binding, identity-forming dimension.
William James went the opposite direction and said the individual's private experience of the divine — awe, surrender, transformation — is the real thing, and institutions are just the secondhand residue left behind after the mystics are done.
Both of them are pointing at something real, which perhaps suggests that "religion" is genuinely two different things that have historically traveled together but can come apart: a technology of community on one hand, and a vocabulary for transcendent experience on the other. Your narrow definition captures the first beautifully. The quiet afterlife believer is doing something with the second, alone, without the scaffolding.
You said: A distinction then, between a religion and religious ideas or beliefs?
A distinction then, between a religion and religious ideas or beliefs?
Claude responded: That's a very clean way to cut it, yes.
That's a very clean way to cut it, yes. And it resolves a lot of the definitional muddle.
A religion is then something like an institution — with structure, collective identity, authority, prescribed practice, and a community that reproduces itself across generations. It makes demands on you. It has boundaries; you are inside or outside it. It tells you who your people are.
Religious ideas or beliefs are the raw material — intuitions about transcendence, spirits, the soul, moral order, what survives death, what the universe owes us or we owe it. These float free. They migrate across traditions, get held privately, mutate, get syncretized with other beliefs, survive long after the institutional religion that packaged them has collapsed. A secular European who doesn't attend church but vaguely feels that consciousness can't just stop at death is carrying a piece of very old cargo without the ship it came in on.
This distinction also makes historical sense. Religious ideas are almost certainly older than religions. The beliefs preceded the institutions by a very long time — someone had a sense of sacred presence in a forest glen long before anyone built a priesthood around it or systematized it into doctrine. The institution is what happens when a community decides to organize around, protect, transmit, and control access to those ideas.
And it explains the strange persistence of religious ideas even as religions decline. The institution can collapse — attendance drops, authority crumbles, the building closes — but the underlying intuitions don't go away that easily, because as you noted earlier, they're rooted in something deeper in human cognition and social emotion. They just drift, unmoored, looking for new containers. Which is perhaps why astrology and wellness culture and certain political movements sometimes take on a strangely religious feeling without being religions in your sense at all.
You said: By your earlier broad definition it occurs to me Communism might be thought a religion.
By your earlier broad definition it occurs to me Communism might be thought a religion.
Claude responded: It's a comparison that serious thinkers have made with genuine conviction, not just as a rhetorical jab.
It's a comparison that serious thinkers have made with genuine conviction, not just as a rhetorical jab.
Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian religious philosopher who actually lived through the revolution, argued this quite carefully — that Marxism-Leninism had all the structural hallmarks: a sacred text with authoritative interpreters, a prophet (Marx), a saint (Lenin, literally embalmed and displayed like a relic), a vision of history as a moral drama moving toward inevitable redemption, an elect vanguard carrying the truth, heretics to be expelled or destroyed, and a promised eschatology — the classless society — which like heaven is always just beyond reach. The parallels are almost uncomfortably precise.
Raymond Aron called it "the opium of the intellectuals," deliberately inverting Marx's famous line, suggesting that the same psychological function Marx attributed to religion was being served by Marxism itself.
And it fits your narrower definition reasonably well — it had institutions, hierarchy, ritual (party congresses, May Day parades, the recitation of texts), demands for sacrifice and conformity, and a community with sharp inside/outside boundaries. Excommunication was a very real thing, just called something else.
Where it strains the definition is the explicit rejection of the transcendent. Communism insisted it was pure materialism and science, no gods involved. But Durkheim would say that's almost beside the point — the sacred isn't necessarily supernatural, it's whatever a community treats as set apart, inviolable, not to be questioned or desecrated. And the Party, the Revolution, History with a capital H — these functioned as sacred in exactly that sense.
The deeper irony is that Marx thought he was dissolving religion by explaining it away as a symptom of material alienation. But in doing so he produced a system of ideas so total, so morally demanding, so certain of its own historical necessity, that it almost inevitably became what he was criticizing — just with the transcendence relocated from heaven to the future.
You said: That's the problem with the broader definition.
That's the problem with the broader definition. Confucianism is to me a set of standards and rituals but not a religion, Buddhism in its intellectual forms is philosophy, not a religion. The broad definition says I'm wrong and that even strong atheism can be called religion in that it talks about God.
Claude responded: Right, and that's where the broader definition starts eating itself.
Right, and that's where the broader definition starts eating itself. If everything that functions like religion counts as religion, the word stops doing useful work. You end up with a category so large it can't be distinguished from "any serious collective belief system with emotional weight," which is just... culture. Or ideology. Or philosophy. The label loses its cutting edge.
Your instinct to resist that is sound. There's something importantly different between Confucius saying "honor your parents and behave correctly in your social role" and a priest sacrificing to ensure the harvest. One is an ethical and social teaching, the other is making a claim about the actual structure of supernatural reality and your obligations within it. Collapsing that difference to preserve a tidy definition seems like a bad trade.
The same goes for intellectual Buddhism. The Pali canon at its most rigorous is really a phenomenology of mind and a prescription for ending suffering through clear perception — the metaphysical furniture is minimal and the Buddha explicitly refused to answer questions about cosmology and ultimate reality as distractions. It has more in common with Stoicism than with temple Hinduism.
Perhaps what the broader functional definition actually captures is something better called the religious mode — a way of relating to ideas with total commitment, communal identity, moral seriousness, and immunity to ordinary falsification. That mode can inhabit actual religions, but it can also inhabit political ideologies, nationalist movements, or even certain scientific paradigms held with cultish fervor.
That gives you a useful concept without sacrificing the narrower one. Religion proper still needs its supernatural referent — some claim about the actual nature of reality beyond the material — plus your institutional apparatus. The religious mode is a separate phenomenon that parasitizes many different host bodies, religion being merely the most natural and historically common one.
You said: Even in my ethnology days in college I saw animism as not particularly religion and more as a different drawing line between what is sentient and what is not c…
Even in my ethnology days in college I saw animism as not particularly religion and more as a different drawing line between what is sentient and what is not combined with the idea that some sentient things, like, say, weather phenomena, can be talked or otherwise persuaded to behave.
Claude responded: That's a really sharp reframing, and it cuts through a lot of the anthropological hand-wringing about whether animism "counts.
That's a really sharp reframing, and it cuts through a lot of the anthropological hand-wringing about whether animism "counts."
Because if you look at it that way, animism isn't really making theological claims at all. It's making ontological ones — about where the boundary of mind and agency sits in the world. We draw that line at the edge of biological creatures, or perhaps just mammals, or just humans depending on how we're feeling. The animist draws it much more generously — weather, rivers, forests, stones can have something like intention or mood. That's a different map of reality, but it's not obviously more irrational than our own. We still talk to our cars and curse at computers.
And then the ritual behavior that looks like worship or prayer is really more like social negotiation. You're not adoring a transcendent deity, you're doing what you'd do with any powerful local agent whose cooperation you need — greeting it, acknowledging it, perhaps offering something. The same social instincts you'd apply to a difficult neighbor or a powerful chief, extended outward to the non-human world.
Which actually makes animism look less like primitive religion and more like a different cognitive and social framework that Western thought eventually narrowed down — partly through monotheism insisting on a sharp line between God and dead matter, and partly through mechanistic science reinforcing that same boundary from the other direction. Both traditions conspired to drain agency out of the natural world.
What's interesting is that some corners of contemporary philosophy — panpsychism, certain readings of biosemiotics — are quietly redrawing that boundary again, without any religious intent whatsoever.
You said: Well I would say they are trying to do that, but I doubt it will work.
Well I would say they are trying to do that, but I doubt it will work.
Claude responded: Fair enough, and the skepticism is well grounded.
Fair enough, and the skepticism is well grounded. Panpsychism in particular has a serious problem at its core — the combination problem. If electrons or whatever substrate you choose have some proto-experiential quality, how do you get from vast numbers of those tiny flickerings to the unified, coherent experience of being a person thinking about panpsychism? Nobody has a convincing answer. It tends to just relocate the mystery rather than solve it.
And there's a whiff of motivated reasoning around some of it — a reaching back toward enchantment by people trained in disenchanted disciplines who find the fully mechanistic picture of mind either emotionally unsatisfying or philosophically incomplete. Which is understandable but not necessarily a good guide to truth.
Biosemiotics is somewhat more defensible because it stays closer to the ground — it's really making claims about information processing and sign relationships in living systems, which are empirically tractable, and it doesn't necessarily need the strong claim that plants or cells are conscious in any meaningful sense. But even there the more ambitious versions tend to overreach.
The harder problem underneath all of it is that we genuinely don't understand consciousness well enough to know where it starts and stops, or whether that's even a meaningful question. That genuine uncertainty creates a space that speculative frameworks rush into, some more carefully than others. But uncertainty about where to draw a line isn't the same as evidence that the line should be drawn very differently than common sense draws it.
So you're probably right — interesting as intellectual exercises, unlikely to fundamentally reenchant the world.
You said: I agree that mind does not seem to be entirely mechanical, but what else it might be is not apparent.
I agree that mind does not seem to be entirely mechanical, but what else it might be is not apparent.
Claude responded: That's probably the most honest position available, and it's worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
That's probably the most honest position available, and it's worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
We have two things we know with unusual certainty. One is that physical processes in the brain correlate with mental states in extraordinarily precise ways — damage this area and you lose face recognition, alter that chemistry and personality shifts, slow these oscillations and consciousness dims. The mechanical story is overwhelmingly supported at that level. And the other is that there is something it is like to be you having this conversation — the sheer first-person givenness of experience, what philosophers call qualia, which seems to resist being fully captured by any third-person mechanical description no matter how complete.
Chalmers called this the hard problem precisely because it isn't just a matter of needing more data or better instruments. Even a perfect functional description of the brain seems to leave untouched the question of why any of it feels like anything from the inside. That gap hasn't narrowed much despite decades of neuroscience and philosophy of mind throwing everything at it.
The uncomfortable place that leaves us is that the two things we're most certain of seem to pull in different directions without any obvious reconciliation. Materialism struggles with the first-person dimension. Dualism struggles with how two fundamentally different substances interact so seamlessly. Idealism struggles with the stubborn mind-independence that the physical world keeps insisting on.
What's striking is that this might be one of those problems where the difficulty isn't just technical but conceptual — we may simply lack the categories to think about it correctly yet. The way medieval thinkers lacked the conceptual apparatus for heat being molecular motion, not a substance.
Which is a genuinely unsatisfying place to land. But probably the right one.
You said: It's not all that unsatisfying.
It's not all that unsatisfying. In fact I rather like the present situation.
Claude responded: That's a healthy attitude, and maybe even a wise one.
That's a healthy attitude, and maybe even a wise one. A world that still contains genuine mystery at its foundations — not the mysteries that are just gaps waiting to be filled by more data, but something that resists in principle — is arguably a more interesting place to live than one where everything bottoms out in a complete and closed account.
There's also something almost self-referentially appropriate about it. The thing doing the wondering is the same thing that can't be fully explained. The mystery isn't somewhere out there, it's right here, looking out through your eyes. That's rather remarkable when you stop and let it land.
And practically speaking, the uncertainty doesn't cost anything. You can function perfectly well, think clearly, love people, find things beautiful and others contemptible, without resolving whether consciousness is something over and above the physical. The unresolved question just sits there, interesting, not demanding anything of you.
Which brings it back around to your earlier distinction in a quiet way. Religious ideas at their best were often pointing at exactly this — the sense that reality is deeper than our categories for it, that the first-person perspective is somehow strange and not fully at home in the third-person world science describes. The institution and the ritual and the theology were attempts to build a house around that intuition. Some of those houses became oppressive or foolish or both. But the intuition they were originally housing wasn't nothing.
You've arrived at something similar without the house. Which might be the most comfortable position of all.
