A god? No. There are some (a further subset!) that also believe in gods. Neither of these is a necessity at all from the Dao De Jing. The Dao makes no express mentioned of ancestor worship. It is fully a mystics enterprise.
An anomaly. I think like the Carvaka philosophy in Hinduism, Confucianism and Daoism are philosophical approaches to life. I think calling them religion perverts the meaning of the word religion and creates an incoherence in understanding the distinction between them. Other than that, we could just do away with the term religion or philosophy and mix them all up as different belief systems. To expand on my thoughts: If someone were to say to me I am a very religious Christian/Muslim/Jew, I would assume they follow the religious rituals associated with their particular sect of Islam, Christianity and Judaism by the majority social consensus POV. If someone said, I am a very religious Daoist, what would it mean?
I understand your point, but I still disagree. (a) It only perverts certain cultures' definition of the word religion, as I said. (b) There will always be difficulty in understanding the difference. (c) Even if you think this, you'll have to either change your definition of religion or of atheism to better accord with your instinct. Just as a note: Daoism and Confucianism are vastly different. Confucianism could not at all accurately be called a religion; not by any definition.
Again, if someone said they were a religious Daoist, what would it mean? And Confucianism like your religious Daoism, also has elements of ancestor worship in some adherents. Although I'd be interested to hear the differences between the two philosophies and what makes one a religion and not the other, in your opinion.
I believe there is ancestor worship in Confucianism. But more importantly you have someone speaking, in the analects, in absolute terms about morals as if they were objective. Further you have someone making clear and absolute statements about what good and smart people will do, period. To me this is a direct claim to transcendance/objectivity on the part of the speaker, given the unbelievable complex nature of human beings and life. This to me makes C a religion. A key word is bold there is especially. Which allows for exceptions. Further to include Buddhism which does not (necessarily) have superhuman agencies - as is included in number 2 - keeps that door open also. And last, a reiteration, isn't any claim to objective morals and clear, universal knowledge about what is best for all humans religious in nature? I can see being objective and universal about certain simpler phenomena - say along Newtonian lines - but humans.....?
Not sure exactly why you see neo-Platonism as incompatible with religion (Didn't the catholic church call upon Plato to pad out their philosophical pretexts via St Augustine?). Frankly I think neo-platonism is a good theoretical model to begin introducing theistic concepts (like the idea of the values that we find intrinsically valuable to this existence being a perverted reflection of a perfect existence). Perhaps I would say it starts to lose its integrity when starting to approach issues of practical application (Since even plato admitted he was trying to describe something he didn't have proper knowledge of .... ). To say the least, I'm not sure how you draw your four point parallel to neo-platonism .... although I suspect that you might we might be focusing on different aspects of it when we determine its value.
Religion is just an ecclictic mixture of poetry, art, music, myth, dogmatic brainwashing, ritualistic superstition, personal meditation and subconscious inspiration, hallucinations, bad logic, extraordinary claims without evidence, undelivered promised rewards, empty and unsuportable threats, magic tricks and illusions, communal get-togethers, agenda pushing, extremist behavior, vague interpretations of hallucinations and dreams, and peer pressure, etc.
I was using the word orthodoxy as a term distinct from say orthopraxy. IOW the idea that you have a way of life (-doxy) in the pursuit of a clear philosophical framework (ortho-). Actually the gist of my post, including the football reference, was to suggest that a heavily ritualized activity that requires intricate social frameworks to determine its value share an uncanny commonality with religion (aka orthopraxy). IOW if you examine elements of orthopraxy (or right ritual/action), you have a blue print for religion. A religious atheist would be someone who has the orthopraxy down but doesn't get high marks on the orthodoxy. For instance take this quote from the padma purana A person who considers demigods like Brahma and Siva to be on an equal level with Näräyana is to be considered a päsandi (aka : atheist). IOW even if one recognizes God and other powerful entities in their daily activities (ie orthopraxy), if they can't properly contextualize the relationships between such personalities (ie orthodoxy) they are an atheist, a helmeted denier of unerasable results ( Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ) ... albeit a religious one.
Actually if you examine all the renaissance periods of human culture that are celebrated for their esteemed contributions to the fields of art, philosophy, music and architecture, you can see that religion is at the heart of it. To label it "eclectic" is a misrepresentation of historical evidence to the contrary these and many more traits share a common thread with any discipline of knowledge (including atheism) that gets institutionalized and embedded in a social/political context.
Pitrloka Yajna This yajna is for obtaining the world of the ancestors and Yama. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yajna http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitri
Another one of those sayings that goes better if you bang your fist on the table when you say it. I have noticed that many theistic people pray to entities that are not Gods quite often - saints and ancestral spirits and so forth - and believe in angels and djinns and other spiritual non-Deities as well. But apparently we are to believe that without the God none of these entities are even imaginable? The Daoists think they have a religion. Likewise the atheistic factions of Buddhism. So do most other people. The Navajo think they have a religion, even the ones who deny there are Gods involved. The atheistic Catholic priests continue to practice - some apparently with sincere faith - the Catholic religion as they see it. I suppose if you simply define all the atheistic spiritualities as "philosophies" rather than "religions" you can claim that all religious belief necessarily implies a deity, but I predict the practitioners of these religions will be unlikely to convert to your worldview easily. And spare a thought for the history of that kind of cultural arrogance, how often it has proved to be something later generations handle with embarrassed silence most of the time. To you? Nothing, apparently. To them? Ask them.
Sounds like politics, ethics, people's ideas about social interactions, the business world....why, pretty much everything but the most carefully worked out testing protocol, including what people then do with the results of those protocols when they interact with society and fellow humans.
We know what religion is. Applied to theism, it is centuries of art, poetry, literature and architecture dedicated to the concept of God and an unbroken line of the historicity of civilisation. What are the manifestations of religious atheism? So you have no concept of what the religious Daoist is?
Well, frankly you're the one trying to impose a more rigid definition of religion on the whole matter. I've rolled with your definitions because they still implied that one could be both religious and an atheist. Daoism is, in general, labeled a religion. It is, in Chinese, a 宗教. This is set in stone, particularly as it is the only major 宗教 first to appear in China. You missed a very important part of the Analects, then. Confucius is very clear that he does not pretend to know the will of the gods and would have no business trying to speak of any matter related to them. This is usually highlighted as one of the massive causes for Confucianisms success in China. The long running (self-applied) comment on the Chinese is that they are a people "unable to be religious". The Analects, under a certain and very popular reading, is not much different than Machiavelli in terms of form or content. Confucius, unlike the men who used his name, also appears to have had the Socratic modesty. He regularly points out that he could be wrong about the whole deal. My very favourite part of the whole Analects is when he says that his rules are all well and good, but only a fool would expect men to be moral when faced with the choice between justice and more sex. The Analects possesses none of the "Yay, I am the way and the light" of any of the other religions. It espouses more of a Socratic like modesty. Was David Hume a theologian? Nah. Aspects of it - the idea of the perfect - are well-suited to religion, but not when carried to their logical extremes. This is my personal opinion, but I don't think neo-Platonism (or plain ol' Platonism) can lead anywhere except to authoritarianism and forced worship. But this is a different topic entirely. I'd be happy to discuss it else where if you'd like. Agreed. Art, poetry, philosophy... pretty much the same thing you said, except that it's a smaller subset. As are all subsets.
That has to be by far the most stretched definition I've ever seen for religion. Completely wrong, of course, but certainly a huge stretch of the imagination. Art is art, poetry is poetry, literature is literature, architecture is architecture, and religion is the belief in the supernatural. Hope that helps.
