Page 15 "By 'Religion' Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am only calling *supernatural* Gods delusional.
This is not a general way in which religion is defined and it is a bit of an atheismism. When I am talking about the *problems* of religion, I define it as a zealous pursuit of a particular ideology. Whether it is Islam, Scientology or zealous atheism, the more zealous the pursuit is, the more "religious" I believe it to be. The control of the flow of information to "footsoldier" followers of the ideology can multiply the evil of the leader by many orders of magnitude. By defining religion so narrowly, atheists let other zealous ideologies off the hook completely. Being that scientifically concurrent "religions" are on the ascendant should not necessarily mean that they will be less zealous or evil in a very similar way that atheists describe traditional religions.
2 comments:
Yes, I tend to use the words 'religion' and 'ideology' interchangeably. I guess 'religion' could be defined as 'metaphysical ideology' as opposed to 'political ideology' or 'social ideology'. We do have to watch out for folks defining these words in all sorts of different ways, don't we? I remember debating with the evangelical Christians at uni, and the way they used 'religion' to mean 'works righteousness' as opposed to 'grace', which was initially confusing.
Yes. And the evangelicals I talked to that agreed that "religion" was bad, but that it was those other denominations that were religious, not theirs.
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