[MD] Religion as social, as intellectual and even as atheistic.

[david]

>From the magazine "Philosophy Now":



"Everyone reading William James’ (1842-1910) seminal 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience
 will be impressed by the huge variety of religious ideas. Nevertheless,
 that variety is to a considerable extent caused by James’ very broad 
conception of religion. Jamesian ‘religion’ encompasses all the 
fundamental visions of life, including political, ideological and 
philosophical stances. Such a view is popular among those who approach 
religion from a psychological or sociological perspective, as James did.
 We clearly detect this view in James’s definition of religion as “the 
feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so 
far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they 
may consider the divine.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Penguin edition, p.31.)

What James called ‘Emersonian optimism’ or ‘Buddhist pessimism’ also 
betrays a relation to the divine, so these positions are ‘religions’, 
according to his definition:




'We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these 
godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’; and accordingly when in our
 definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what 
he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very 
broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.' (p.34.)




This brought James to a conception of religion as 'man’s total reaction upon life.' (p.35.)"





You can read the whole article here: https://philosophynow.org/issues/78/The_Varieties_of_Atheist_Experience