Just before this thread dives into throwing apples and oranges at each other.

What is a "religion"?

There are many very different dimensions

• believing in higher beings/deities
• ethical behavior (commandments like "don't kill" to "don't fart drive cars" )
• political impact (e.g. cast system or using priests as functionaries or seeing a king as gods representative )
• adopted traditions (from Christmas trees to female circumcision)
• ethnic group thru strict endogamy *

@Erix: Darwin didn't solve the problem of the watchmaker, and Kant proved long ago that there can't be any proof either way.

Instead of discussing the badly defined R-word we should concentrate on aspects affecting our past and future - especially in a globalized world.

*) updated

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.