[Michael Chui]

You could say something similar about cultures, though, and languages.

To draw that linguistic analogy out and digress a bit, I happen to be a fan of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is essentially summed up as "Language expresses identity." Push this a little and you realize that everyone has their own identity, because everyone has an accent. Cultural identity appears because the differences in all of these accents, inside a culture, has a very small differentiation. But take America. Native-born Americans have the American accent: go abroad and pretend you're fluent in another language and you'll be laughed at for your American accent. I definitely have it in spades. And yet, by one's accent, people can tell where you were born. The best of such people can distinguish which side of a lake you were raised, just from that accent.

What is language? It, too, is artifically constructed, poorly defined. Anthropologists have the same problem with culture. Where does it end or begin? Do children have a different culture from their parents? They frequently have different habits, expectations, practices... Heck, it's the children who invent creoles.

Religion, like culture, is an answer to the question, "Why do people do things?" But religion isn't culture; it's just one particular type of culture. Granted, it might be true that you can classify cultures into religious and secular, and that dichotomy might be all-encompassing, but I think it's hard to say that there is no culture without religion.

There is fact. For instance, people are born and people die. They sit, bathe, walk, meditate. They simply do it.

Then there is context. People are executed, succumb to illness. Women were raped, and thus come about children. Etc.

And then there is reasoning. Executions are an application of law. Rape may occur because of misogynist institutions.

And behind reasoning, you have culture: the source of the reasoning. And I would argue that religion is simply one type of culture.