some tangential thoughts about religion

Jim,

It's because your essay is compelling and makes me think rather than because I mean to criticize it that I respond. Apologies for the tangent, but this is what I am wondering:

Is a "religion" a kind of institution (belonging to a church), a trait of human biology (religiousness), an activity (ritual, prayer, displays of committment), a set of beliefs of some particular sort, or what?

It seems to me that any theory about why people do what they do has to first distinguish the domain of what they are doing as something recognizably distinct, and then expore it from there. I'm concerned that we talk about religion as if we mean the same thing by it, when the concept seems to be prototypical in structure (there are no true criteria to distinguish it objectively by neccessary and sufficient conditions) and it is only certain central cases that we are all pretty sure to agree on.

Something that stumps me, along the lines of a thought experiment: did "religion" exist before we had a secular tradition to contrast it with?

If you compare "religious behavior" to flocking and clustering without linked reference to the other aspects of religion, then why limit the comparison to religious behavior (and why distinguish this as theory regarding religion at all) when we do the same thing in some sense in all social contexts, including this one. How is it a theory of religious behavior in particular?

kind regards,

Todd

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