Jon Johanning wrote:
>
>
> I don't know about that -- it might be true if science *had*
> metaphysical foundations, which it doesn't.
>
That's arguable in principle, but historically, actual scientific work
has always had metaphysical foundations, which are particularly clear in
the work of the more famous scientists. Darwin's belief (following
Lyell), for example, in the "principle of uniformitarianism." Or
Newton's belief in a clockwork universe and action at a distance. Though
the fact that scientists do no live "outside society" does not justify
any cavalier scrunching of science & religion or the claim of (some)
(self-labelled) "post-modernists" that science is merely an ideology.
And I agree with you, on fairly simple grounds of keeping a vocabulary that we share, that "organized religion" should be seen as a redundancy. That's what we _mean_ by "religion." If some form of belief sharing generic qualities with "organized religion" exists, a new vocabulary ought to be coined to describe and argue for that species of religious belief. Otherwise we get in arguments such as "X is a mammal," "No, X is a feline," "No, X is a lion," "No, X is a vertebrate." The same difficulty arises when various social theories or practices (and not just marxism) are labelled "religion." A momentary rhetorical ploy such as that merely clogs the streams of discourse. It's bad writing.
Carrol