Being an atheist doesn’t mean being anti-religious. This recent letter in the local newspaper (scroll down to the Ten Commandments header) prompts me to write about something that has bothered me for a long time. Some of us are both definitely atheists and actively religious at the same time.
Most Americans will not recognize the intelligibility of this position. The most common definition of religion that Americans seem to carry around in their heads is that religion is a definite system of belief that describes a person’s views on God and the afterlife. If a group offers no commonly accepted description or definition of God and no position on the possibility of life after death, then it’s not a religion. This kind of definition matters—there was a court case in Texas about a decade ago about whether a religious group that held no position about a Supreme Being counted as a religion or not, and therefore whether it was entitled to a tax exemption under state law.
Definitions of religion that depend on the idea of a deity at the center have always bothered me. I am a third generation Unitarian Universalist, the granddaughter of a humanist and the child of UU ministers with different views of theism. I am sure based on my experience that Unitarian Universalism is a religion; but I am equally sure that there are atheists among us (including me). As a UU youth, I often encountered people who did not believe that my church was a religious group. How could it be, if there was no God? This is a hard question for a kid to answer, and is perhaps only harder (if less frequently encountered) for an adult.
It seems to me that defining one group as a religion and another not based on its position on God is an approach that takes Christianity as a platonic ideal and extrapolates based on Christian elements alone. It is not clear to me, for example, that Buddhism, one of the world’s oldest and most clearly “religious” religions, does not meet this test.
So, for today, here is my definition of a religion:
A religion is a set of beliefs and practice, cultivated in a communal context, that allow people across the lifespan to frame and answer transcendent questions.
