I was thinking about the definition of a religion, and decided it has the following features:
1. Oral or written traditions.
2. Group activities and rituals.
3. A professional priesthood.
4. A behavior code.
5. A theory of the creation and of the afterlife.
6. A sense of mysticism.
And I define it so that something is a religion if it has at least five of the six features. Something like Confucianism is close, but it has only four features.
That's one of those abstract things I sometimes think about. I've been thinking recently about three-dimensional geometry, and Platonic and Archimedean solids. (They're the three-dimensional figures formed with regular polygons as their faces. The most famous example is the cube.)
Saturday, February 02, 2013
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