The Myth of Religious Neutrality

Some beliefs are obviously not religious, such as my belief that I'm going to have noodles for lunch. That's not religious, even though it elicits thanksgiving. I think it's true, however, that everyone has some sort of religious belief. As Chesterton, like always, once said, if man refuses to worship God, the result is not that he will worship nothing, but that he'll worship anything. But even when it doesn't result in worship, I think everyone has religious beliefs. What makes a belief religious? This is the question Roy Clouser asks in the first chapter of his book The Myth of Religious Neutrality.

To answer this question, we need to determine what all religious beliefs, and no other beliefs, share. Usually, people tie in religious beliefs with worship. However, in some religious traditions, worship is non-existent, for example, in some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism. Others think that religious beliefs serve the purpose of giving a group an ethic. Again, though, many groups which aren't religious have ethics. From what I understand, Confucianism is only a code of ethics for a well ordered society.

These obvious definitions fail us. Continuing on, then, one might define religious belief as belief in God or in gods. Once more, though, we are foiled by counter-examples. Pythagoreans did not believe in God or in gods. They believed that numbers were the primary things in the universe, the stuff of which everything else was made. They held, as a religious belief, that 1+1 = 2.

Roy Clouser proposes another definition of religious belief, one which I think covers the basics. He calls it primary religious belief. It covers the whole spectrum of religions, and only religions. It is this:

A religious belief is belief in something as diving per se no matter how that is further described, where “divine per se” means having unconditionally non-dependent reality.

This definition does not assimilate the different ideas of what is divine. It says that every religious belief is about what is divine per se, but allows that different religions believe different things are divine per se. Pantheists believe one thing, Christians believe another, and atheists believe yet another. This definition, as the last sentence revealed, includes even the supposedly non-religious. Some people don't like to include atheism as a religion, but we should. Atheism and theism are enemies, after all, in a way that theism and, say, the PTA are not, or that Atheism and the Engineering society are not.

This is only the first chapter of this book, but I'm really excited about it. Clouser promises to prove that all theories necessarily depend on one religious belief or another. Such an argument would disarm opponents who try to devalue Christian arguments because they are religious. We can rejoice, as we always should have, that our arguments are religious. They are inevitably so.