Some Say, "Religion Is Elusive"

R S Ron I think this is inadequate, being parochial because too much influenced by the three Abrahamic theistic "religions" (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) & their notion that religion is about beliefs, doctrines, creeds, commandments, scriptures, rituals & the like. Religion-in-general is elusive & very difficult to define or characterize, as the cultural anthropologists warn us, & to distinguish from magic, superstition, mythology, folklore, etc. Some anthropologists have claimed to find tribes with no religion, but others dispute this, saying it is the result of a too-narrow view of what religion is. 🤔

Religion as a human behavior accounts for various characteristic elements in the conduct of atheists. Mircae Eliade focused on the "Sacred" and "Profane," for example, which are terms especially modern ideological atheists themselves hardly might recognize or apply to themselves, which reveals a few things including the value of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Drawing on my own background based in Bio Anthro, Psych, Int Rel, et al, the career work of a Harvard ed Anthro-ist named Eliot Chapple provides a powerful behavioral-interactional foundation that has simply been widely ignored and unaccounted for because of social theory presumption. An adequate account requires that bridge to the Biology of Symbolic Behavior. In its psychological angle, God is understood relationally with reference to the Universe, so that modern atheists are normally materialists. Process Theology has begun to address some features of Christianity using Whitehead´s points, and George Fox of the Quakers made some interesting developments that appear to be a form of spiritual modernization. Christian monasticism also takes an interesting role. All that is enriched in a framework that includes work on Comparative spiritual practice and systems like Buddhism, Therapeutic Psych, Transpersonal Psych, New Thought Christianity, and the Anthro of Shamanism.