So, recently I was talking to a friend and somehow we got to talking about religion and stuff. When I complained that religion is often put on a huge pedestal and that it’s really just a glorified opinion and should be subject to the same criticism as any other opinion, they told me that that was a really hot take.
According to them, belief and religion is more than just an opinion since it’s such a big part of people’s lives. I countered that opinions are also big parts of people’s lives and personalities. I mean, a huge chunk of your personality is based on your opinions, right?
We agreed to disagree but I kept thinking about it. I don’t get why religion shouldn’t just be treated like any other opinion just because people tend to cling to it. I get that it people are emotionally invested but that’s not just the case with religion but other opinions too. I would appreciate your thoughts to help me understand better, is it really a hot take?
Nope. Opinion is simply the wrong word. The best English term for what a religion is, is probably belief system. Belief and opinion aren’t entirely synonymous - opinions have a much stronger notion of personal judgement (i.e. how tings should be) - but more importantly a religion isn’t just a belief, it’s a huge set including many beliefs that do - more or less - fit together. Hence it’s a system.
In German we also also use the word “Weltanschauung” (literally translates to worldview but fits a religion better than the English word).
So you can’t just compare the entire religion to an opinon about, let’s say whether or not school lunches should include bacon. But you can compare individual opinions and beliefs held by religious people to those of people without imaginary friends. A Christian’s opinion on abortion may be influenced by their religion but there’s a lot of denominations that are pro choice. Hence a Christian being against abortion is indeed just voicing a opinion.
On the other side, there definitely are non-religious belief systems. Humanism for example.
I agree that ‘opinion’ is a bad term, but ‘belief system’, while wildly used, is hiding its true nature, which believers do not want to and often cannot confront because of the high cognitive dissonance it would cause. I think there is no one word to accurately describe it. My attempt to put it in one sentence is: a shared delusion by indoctrination that fills a mental space that people have varying degrees of natural predisposition for.
All of the parts are important and all of them contradict the ‘just another opinion’ stance.
Shared: because religion and/or belief is inherently irrational, it helps if a lot of people or at least a significant portion of a person’s community have the ‘same’ beliefs because it gives them perceived validity.
Indoctrination: to achieve the previous point, it is important to instill the beliefs in children, so ‘optimally’ they are perceived as natural and not questioned.
Natural predisposition: there’s plenty of evidence, that there are specific regions in the brain which are active in believers, when they pray or partake in rituals. No matter the religion. This can also be true for people who are not part of any formal religion, but ‘tap into’ this spiritual part of the brain by meditation or other personal means. Then again, there are people where these regions are ‘dead’/not there. And as always with humans: it is a spectrum.
Delusional: the ‘core tenet’ of belief is the acceptance of certain statements at face value against any amount of contradicting information, which is enabled by all the previous points.
So, how does this contrast with opinions? Anybody can have or form an opinion on anything. For any given subject there is a set of information for which a subset is available to an individual. This subset gets sorted, weighted, and filtered based on individual acquired discriminators. Those discriminators can come from all sorts of stuff, including education and religion. The available information as well as the sorting, weighting, and filtering can change over time and lead an individual to drastically reform their opinions. That is less likely (figuratively impossible) with a belief.
So, while it is possible to have religiously ‘informed’ opinions, they are very different in their nature from beliefs. And the word ‘belief system’ does not deny, but hides the mechanics that diferentiates opinions from beliefs.
(imho)
Yeah, “an opinion” is poorly chosen phrasing. Obviously, it’s lots and lots of opinions. Should’ve chosen my words better.
Next time the topic comes up, do you think it would be better if I said that religious beliefs are a huge set of opinions that form a person’s core beliefs and that these opinions and as a result the beliefs should be subject to scrutiny and criticism, just like non-religious opinions and beliefs? Is that phrased better or still “wrong” but put into different words?
Absolutely. That makes much easier to find fair comparisions. After all not all religous beliefs are held deeply and many non religious people have beliefs that are incredibly important to them. E.g. the no alcohol ruls in Islam isn’t especially well adhered to among Muslism in Western countries wheras your average atheist vegan will go ballistic if you try to make them eat pork.
Gotcha, thank you so much for your input! It helped a ton
My local FB group has this horrendous edgelord troll that uses “Weltan schauung” as their name. I’m not convinced that it’s not a paid troll. I’ve seen multiple accounts using the exact same picture for their profile. It’s a picture of a sunset.