What constitutes a religion?
Let’s begin by asking what religion is. Some say it is a form of belief in God. But that would not fit Zen Buddhism, which does not really believe in God at all. Some say it is a belief in the supernatural. But that doesn’t fit Hinduism, which doesn’t believe in a supernatural realm beyond the material world, but only a spiritual reality within the empirical. What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing. For example, some think that this material world is all their is, that we are here by accident and when we die we just rot, and therefore the important thing is to choose to do what makes you happy and not let others impose their beliefs on you. Notice that this is not an explicit, organized religion, it contains a master narrative, an account about the meaning of life along with a recommendation for how to life based on that account of things. Some call this
