Again, you just seem to be stating this, not offering an argument (or I misunderstood your sentences before that). I still don't see why a belief that's false (or at least held for bad reasons) should more likely lead to oppression than a belief that's true (or well evidenced or whatever). Surely it's the content of the belief that is to blame here. So you seem to be saying that if it's not properly evidenced, it is more likely to have content that leads to oppression? I might be a bit dense here, but I don't see the necessity of that connection.
There is no technical meaning to religion because it's a term that has evolved naturally over the centuries and within / between different social and linguistic groups, that's why, to Shpaller's dismay, we often need to go back 500 years to look at the origin of the term. Sociologists have tried to provide meaningful definitions of religion, and they all have to cover what "people normally refer to", because you cannot have a definition of a social phenomenon that departs too much from what people think it is. The general problem is that whenever you have a definition of religion that covers everything that people tend to think of as religious, then it also ends up covering things that are not commonly regarded as religion (this could include science, but also nationalism, football fandom, atheism etc); OR it is so narrow that some things that are commonly regarded as religious are left out (including quite often East Asian religions because they're just too different from our European conceptions of religion; but also often things that say catholics or methodists will tell you is religion). This is a well known problem and usually part of chapter 1 of any sociology of religion textbook.Millennie Al wrote: ↑Sun Dec 12, 2021 5:01 amIf you mean that "religion" has been given a specific technical meaning within a particular field, I would not be surprised, but also consider it irrelevant. Many fields take ordinary words and give them special meanings. But if you mean that religion as people normally refer to it does not mean belief without regard to evidence (which is not quite the same thing as without evidence), then I would very much disagree and would like to see your definition of religion.
Since you're interested in what "people normally refer to" though, there's plenty of research on this. Just an example that comes to my mind right now, I'm currently reading a book on interviews with Polish and Ukrainian scientists on their views on science vs religion, which also includes a lot of thinking about what religion is - these include atheist, catholic, orthodox and Greek catholic scientists - and as you can imagine the opinions and views of what exactly is religion differs a lot here. But there is certainly no consensus that the essence of religion is "faith without evidence". I know you'll disagree with these good people, but you're the one who wants to ground the definition on what people normally refer to, so you cannot now go and disagree with what the people tell you.