• Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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    9 days ago

    Okay well since we couldn’t agree on a definition that encompasses all religions, drag is going to continue believing there’s no such thing as religion.

    • Ookami38
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      9 days ago

      That’s fine. Any effort to perfectly categorize everything based on some kind of ruleset tends to fail. Most real world things don’t really fall neatly into boxes like we want them to. Looking at species and gender as the two obvious examples.

      We have yet to settle on an actual definition for “species” that works in every case. It was originally “can produce reproductively viable offspring” but a myriad of species break this rule. Then there’s dogs. Every pet dog belongs to the species Canis Familiaris. It takes one look at a beagle and a great dane, for instance, to see where that doesn’t exactly feel right.

      Gender (or sex, even) is another example where categorization fails. For the longest time, we had two of each, and anything else was aberrant. Then we saw that there were enough odd cases that a third “intersex” category was added and wildly accepted. Today, we see so many different expressions of gender and sex that the categories of “male” and “female” have largely lost the meaning they have. They’re just not useful descriptors of what we actually see.

      Almost every attempt at categorization will end up with edge cases where we just have to make an arbitrary distinction. If you want that to be the nail in the coffin to say “religion’s don’t exist” then fine. Neither do music genres. Gender. Species. Or we can have an actual discussion on these topics, settle on a functional meaning for this conversation (as I tried to do multiple times) and actually exchange ideas, learn, and grow.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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        9 days ago

        Genre, gender, and species don’t exist either, but there are uses to pretending they do. There’s actually a use to pretending religion exists too. It’s to prevent religious discrimination. Protecting beliefs from persecution is the reason to keep the idea of religion around.

        This post isn’t quite in the spirit of that goal, though, so drag thinks OP shouldn’t be allowed to have a definition of religion. Only people who aren’t going to use the idea to do harm should have it. As far as antitheists are concerned, religion doesn’t exist.