It was funny as heck to me at the time to see fundamentalist 
Christians, members of the Unification Church, and pagans 
bombarding Congress with letters, all taking the same side.

But then I've said before that there's about four or so different 
phenomena that we only have one word for in English.  Religion can 
mean roughly the same thing as "culture" - the beliefs that parents 
teach their children and have an expectation, reasonable or not, 
that the kids will carry that culture on and pass it on to their 
kids.  On the other hand, religion can mean doctrines and beliefs 
that the individual has to think, believe, or "have faith in" - and 
by definition, that's individual rather than cultural.  On yet 
another hand, religion can mean personal relationship with Deity, 
with Higher Consciousness - which can be (and in my opinion usually 
is) separate from either of the other two.  Then there's community 
and group work motivated by altruism, which only rarely overlaps 
any of the other three.  Yet we only have one word for all these 
separate phenomena: they're "religion."

The same people who decry the work of Christian missionaries on 
Indian reservations ("Cultural imperialism!  It'll be the death of 
that whole way of life!") defend heartily their right to practice a 
way of life, to maintain beliefs, to identify with a religious 
culture and to relate to Deity in a way entirely opposed to the way 
their parents brought THEM up.  Perhaps this doesn't seem odd to 
you, but it certainly seems odd to me.

--- Sirius 0.50

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