Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Chui  It's possible to separate it. When this happens, you either become an apostate or a revolutionary/leading thinker.  |
But in this case, are you so much separating it, or are you adjusting your perception of it? I don't think religion can be extracted from its social context; when one becomes an apostate or (religious) revolutionary, I would tend to think that s/he is making adjustments to a (perceived) religious/social discontinuity, whether this is a conscious choice or not. To me, religion is very much a social construct, and so it requires the social framework for it to function. By the same token, I don't think one can necessarily just "remove" religious aspects from culture -- they may cease to call it religion, but it is still there (then again, I'm one of those types who thinks that atheism is as much a religion as theism, so ...
) Religion is defined as much by its (attempted) "absence" as it is by its presence in a cultural context.