Yes I have heard that one too. I have also heard that he said that, theology is the only subject in which the objective is not to move the study forwards.

true talk

And I also meant to mention crushing college debts that take in some cases 15 to 20 years to pay off…….At least according to a few public school teachers I know as well as 2 lawyers I’m friends with.

@TheMiddleWay
Where I use the phrase "from a scientific perspective" I'm not referring to some perceived scientific dogma. I'm talking about using scientific thinking, instead of guesswork, to arrive at a reasonable hypothesis, given what has been discovered by science, regardless of what hasn't yet been discovered.

There is no scientific consensus as to what precisely constitutes a religion.

But anyone, scientist or otherwise, can use a scientific perspective when examining, and trying to make sense of, the many aspects of human behavior that have yet to be "proven" to be this way or that.

Judging the complex set of behaviors we commonly call religion only by their outward manifestations, such as god worship, etc. is to completely ignore the evolutionary implications of a behavior that is inherent in human populations wherever and whenever they are found in geography or history.

Your main meal is the junkfood of trending popular folklore, which holds that worship is servile submission to a literal, all-powerful person who has the ability to bestow eternal life upon those who obey - while an etymological examination of the word worship finds it to refer only to a recognition of worth.

The most cursory of investigations on Wikipedia shows that there are plenty of scholarly opinions on religion that don't depend on modern, popular distortions of words like god, worship, sacred, or supernatural.

For dessert, I suggest you try the idea that you are demoting the evolutionary significance of religion to a folkloric strawman.

@skado As you rightly say. "There is no scientific consensus as to what precisely constitutes a religion." Nor I think is there any such thing as a valid scientific perspective. To accuse TheMiddleWay of setting up a strawman of religion, by using as evidence a strawman of science, is just too ridiculous for words.

There may indeed be a science of folklore, because folklore is a real thing which is within the realm of scientific study, but the definition of the word religion is a philosophical, etymological and epistemological issue, not a scientific one.

And for what it is worth, I will throw in my own philosophical definition of religion, which up to date has served me well, with few anomalies or exceptions. Which is that. Religion is is the use of fake authority, whether that authority comes from "god worship", "folklore" an old book or ritual, it does not matter. It only matters that religion equates almost exactly, (Please note the almost. ) to the fallacy of proof by authority, especially when that authority offers no justification of its worth.

Which is a poor starting point for any "ethical teaching" even the "non-denominational " sort, if that is even possible. It is notable that Nationalism, Fascism and Marxism have been called religions in the past and certainly all have on occasion fallen well within your definition of. "Wherever humans are modifying their instinctual behaviours, by cultural means, for the purpose of social cohesion and coordination, religion is happening. " And I need not dwell on the history which happened in the most fundamental expressions of those, proofs by authority. The Point of which is. That religion like all false authority is of most use only to the promoters of evil, if you wish to modify instinctual behaviours in good directions there are real and well tested means, such as science, philosophy, and epistemology available, which not only serve just as well, but are much more suited to the honest and well meaning, and do not require the morally degenerative dangers of close association with fake authority and the bad company which follows in it wake.

@TheMiddleWay

Any time during human civilization, prior to a couple hundred years ago, if you had asked for a definition of long distance overland conveyance it would surely have mentioned horses as integral to the definition. So well established was such an assumption that to this day we still speak of motorized vehicles as having strength measured in horsepower. We still "hang up" on phone calls when there is no longer anything to "hang" the receiver on. Today the entire phone is inside the handset (not to mention a camera, a radio, a compass, and countless other gadgets). But we still say "hang up the phone".

Literal god concepts no more define the purpose of religion today than horses define transportation or hangable handsets define communication. The focus I'm suggesting here is on the functional aim of a technology rather than on the current or ancient means of accomplishing it.

Religion, like language, or math, or indeed, science, is a psychotechnology. It was and is a mental discipline that had and still has a function that massively impacts our evolutionary trajectory. It makes little difference, evolutionarily, whether we accomplish that function by envisioning the totality of reality as a literal sentient being or as a cold mindless universe - the function is the same - it still created us, and we still must obey its laws or suffer the consequences.

While scholars are still arguing about precise definitions, the best we can do is use our own eyes and minds and argue amongst ourselves about what the academics have said, and what they have failed to say. For the most part, these days they are coming around to the idea that religion is not only driven in some way by the combined forces of evolution, but acknowledging that it is an actual adaptation per se.

In this context, it matters not by which means we offset the dangers of evolutionary mismatch, only that we do it. The specific manifestations of religion change in response to need. In pre-agricultural societies, what we are calling the human religious impulse was little more than an animistic assumption of "Theory of Mind" but it enabled us to formulate a way of interacting with our environment and each other that helped us cope psychologically, and thereby improve our ability to get our genes into the next generation.

Agriculture changed everything. Farming and concomitant sedentary lifestyles changed our geographic, biospheric, and social environments so radically and rapidly that many less adaptively agile species would have gone extinct (as many did) but we had developed a "rapid response mechanism" that enabled us to modify our behaviors away from certain maladaptive (in the new environment) instinctual impulses and toward pro-sociality.

Whether we continue to measure units of energy in comparison to the power of a horse - whether we continue to end our telephonic communications by hanging the handset on cradle connected to an off-switch - whether we continue to envision our creator as an all-powerful humanoid who tells us how to better function as a team... travel will go on... the starting and ending of electronic conversations will go on... and if we are as sapient as we like to think we are, we will go on individually and culturally modifying some of our now maladaptive behaviors by taking up self-imposed disciplines that heretofore have been called religion. Ritualistic submission to literal supernatural gods has as little to do with religion as buggy whips have to do with transportation - they are a temporary means to a permanently needed function.

Not only does defining religion in terms of evolutionary function not broaden it to meaninglessness, it narrows it to exclude extemporaneous explication, and to focus on its critical existential implications.

In short, Mustang Sally needs to hang up the phone and drive... to her anthropology class... where she will learn how to help her species survive the exponentially increasing evolutionary mismatch that will otherwise put an end to her horsing around. It doesn't matter what we call it. It matters that we recognize the function, and continue to meet its vital requirement.

@Fernapple
...also others with a different religious background feel choked that xtianity's views or policies being forced down their throats which (can) cause resentment between learners or towards the school in that the school favours one (religion) over the other. ...so best religion is kept out permanently whether private or public schools. Problem is that the majority of private schools are xtian influenced and it's kinda that's what it's gonna be if you are accepted - abide by or like it or lump it.