[Mnemosyne]

My initial post contained a very broad definition of what I think religion is.

I gave it a little more thought and then remembered an article I read yesterday.

I work in IT, as a Business Intelligence (BI) consultant. Basically a fancy word for turning data into information. Anyway, in BI there is a practice called Master Data Management (MDM), in which you try to manage metadata (which is data about data). The advantage of MDM is that, if done correctly, a company can maintain a "single version of the truth". This is a big advantage because different departments within a company often store the same data, albeit a little bit differently, and usually attach their own meaning behind the data thereby creating multiple versions of the "truth".

So the article I was reading was about MDM and it was entitled, "There is No Single Version of the Truth". It cited an example of a trying to come up with a company-wide definition of a Customer. Marketing will probably always want to include prospects as customers while accounts receivable will only recognize customers as individuals or organizations that have been sent a bill for goods or services. In order for each department to agree on what a customer is, the definition has to be very general. For example, "an individual or organization we potentially do business with". This overgeneralized definition is difficult to characterize as incorrect, but it is hard to see what is excluded from the term when you need to think about specific instances in real-world situations. By accepting overgeneralized definitions, the definition becomes irrelevant and cannot be used for anything practical.

Sorry for going off topic like that but I really do think it applies to the definition of religion. I think it even applies to the purpose of religion. Since each religion has a built-in meaning of its faith, that may or may not match the meaning of another faith, then the only way to define religion is to overgeneralize it, such as I did in my previous post. But the overgeneralization doesn't really tell you anything meaningful.

Now that I think about it, I think it applies to a lot of things, not just religion. Maybe there really is no single version of the truth? I'm not sure though, just something that popped into my head...