Dear Jardine,

I think that Suse has a valid point: The worship of the devil is not religion!

The New Oxford American Dictionary, (Second Edition) lists THREE different meanings of the word “religion” :

1. the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods;
2. a particular system of faith and worship (as in 'the world's great religions');
3. a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion: (as in 'consumerism is the new religion').

Gear writes: "It is 'the quest for the values of the ideal life involving three phases, the ideal, the practices for attaining the values of the ideal, and the theology or world view relating the quest to the environing universe'."

My copy Budget Macquarie Dictionary 3rd. edition 2000 printing
RELIGION: N. Recognition on the part of human beings of a controlling superhuman power entitled to obedience, reverence and worship.

Are the words that comprise the majority of your opening paragraph [and which I quote above] in fact copied verbatim from your dictionary or are they your interpretation of your dictionary's definition?

No matter how you contrive it, the "ingredients" you tout are not to be found in the Macquarie definition. As for your "phases", you conflate "theology" with "world view"
THEOLOGY: N. The science or study of divine things or religious truth, divinity.

It would be obvious, even to the densest of readers, that individual world views comprise a vastly broader spectrum of views than those concerned only with the divine and/or the religious.

Gear writes: "I'm using religion and worldview as essentially equivalent concepts as the dictionary associates religion with worldview and praxis (practice, as opposed to theory). So religion amounts to worldview in action."

It might be interpreted that all theology can be supported as a world view but does it logically follow that all world view is theology? Declaring synonymy between the two is blatant, self-serving balderdash. It is the equivalent of declaring "Airplanes fly in the sky therefore everything that flies in the sky is an airplane", "fish swim in the sea therefore everything that swims in the sea is a fish.".......which is of course, bunkum.

Gear insults our intelligence by composing four pages of unmitigated waffle trying to justify his contention. [Continued]

George,

I take it the third definition (which is the third for a reason) was the one you were wanting to highlight.

While there is nothing wrong with saying that someone does something or follows something “religiously”; or that, colloquially, some may refer to a new or increasingly popular pursuit as a “new religion”, that is very different from branding a pursuit or a cause as an actual religion, or as being on par with an actual religion as though it contained rituals, a dogma, and unprovable beliefs - which is usually what is insinuated in articles like this one, and some of the comments in discussion threads such as these.

As someone who speaks five languages and with English not being your mother tongue, such subtleties may not be as apparent to you.

Colloquially, doing the former is fine. The latter is emotive and dishonest. I think the people at Oxford need to note that their third definition is 'informal' or 'slang'. Nobody, not speaking colloquially, actually refers to anything that does not fit the first two definitions as a religion without the intention to denigrate.

[Continued] As an atheist, I see the Cosmos as an entirely impersonal concept even though we are made of the same stuff as the stars. I am ineluctably led to the logical conclusion that therefore the Cosmos most likely has life in it elsewhere and that, ipso facto, life thrives in other solar systems and in other galaxies. There is nothing theological or religious in this view. I will not debate the substitution of "belief" or allied words for my choices of "logical conclusion" or "most likely"[read "probability"]. The neotheological artifice of Spencer Gear and his ilk have wrought and wrung every thread of credibility to breaking point in their frantic rush to turn atheism into theism, world view into theology, to turn "belief" into anything the theist says it is.

We might profit from examining the motives of theists in promoting such outrageous suggestions.
It seems to me that the theist sees himself as being at a disadvantage, as playing on an uneven field. Does he strive mightily to elevate his own argument with logic and reason in order to draw level with atheism? Is the theist thereby acknowledging atheism's prior superior position then? Or is he striving mightily to reduce atheism so that at theism's level it must bear the same burden of doctrinal constrictions, of dogmatic unreason by being convinced that no religion is really yes religion by another path? But the same question is begged; Is the theist acknowledging atheism's prior superior position then by so arguing?

Is the theist [Spencer Gear in this case] already acknowledging atheism's superiority by adopting from the very outset the stance from which he argues? It looks horribly like it to me.

Posted by runner, Tuesday, 19 July 2016 10:48:27 AM
"the something from nothing brigade are certainly the most irrational believers we have today........."

Hardly! The Uncaused Cause Company have been in the van for yonks now. You Uncaused Causers break us up every time we see you on the road. You guys claim you gotta great big Sumpin' from Nuthin' but we can't have a peece on accounta we's gunner Hell an' He don' like goin' there.....even jus' an iddy biddy peece uv 'Im.


And to think many of them are university trained. No wonder they are able to call evil good and good evil even though they claim not to believe in absolutes."

"Many" of us don't give legitimacy to the concept of "evil". It's a religious word describing something bad and the UCC-ers want us to believe we clean folks 'r gunner get dirty with it all the time, no matter how clean we is. An' it's gunner bring us down cuz we ain't usin' the rite kinda soap. An' sho I don' b'lieve in Abso Lutes! Durn motherf.......got my sistuh pregnant! Guess that makes 'im a sistuhf.......enny 'ows