Religion is a self-sustaining beast.
It reproduces - it's got 'evangelizing' parts and 'have lots of babies' parts - also some vestigial 'don't abort' and 'get married before sex' parts too, which were ideal in its original environment, but now no longer useful.
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It reproduces - it's got 'evangelizing' parts and 'have lots of babies' parts - also some vestigial 'don't abort' and 'get married before sex' parts too, which were ideal in its original environment, but now no longer useful.
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It has survival instincts - it features mechanisms that convert toxins into fuel; as a crude example, "I am doubtful God exists" gets converted into "evidence for Satan, because Satan creates doubt in God", thus ultimately reaffirming the belief. There's a LOT of these.
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It is built for conflict. It processes other frameworks as "wrong", "bad", or "sinful", an incredible hard shell which prevents other viewpoints from penetrating at all. It curls into a hard ball when it identifies the presence of a differing viewpoint.
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It's got a robust immune system to defend against illnesses. If a person inside the system starts showing signs of corruption, the religion has many built-in mechanisms to disrupt, suppress, or eject the malfunctioning parts of its body. 4/
It's got a set of DNA - a book, set of rules, or a specific ideology that serves as the building blocks for its entire being. Over time mutations can appear as culture adopts the instructions to better suit the environment, and sections that failure to adopt die off. 5/
Religion is identifiable as a creature in contrast to other frameworks due to the cohesive, self-sustaining reasons listed above. It has reproduction, survival, defense, immunity, and instructions built in. Most people who are host to an ideological creature are 6/
visibly or measurably different in their behavior than people who don't host a creature (or, more accurately, host much more fluid/smaller scale creatures). They self-segregate, they feature high-sacrifice signaling for greater acceptance of the tribe, they oppose others. 7/
Ironically, according to this definition many liberal churches in America are no longer hosts to religious creatures; the reproductive and defense elements have been eviscerated; their religion has been taxidermied and put on display as some sort of fond memory. 8/
And according to this definition many things that aren't actual religions, are doing the same thing in spirit to religions. The BLM movement seems to be heading this direction - it hits hard every single one of the points I listed above.
