Since you were so kind about it, I’m going to subject you to my thoughts. Mwahahaha!

Here’s how I’m differentiatiating between “order of things” and “facts of existance”: the former can be broken and corrected, while the latter can’t. In every religion, there’s an ordained way of how things will happen, there’s a divine expectation which may clash with what actually happens. As an exception I suppose there could be an completely deterministic religion that refuses free will, though I haven’t heard one and sort of doubt it’d be popular. A fact cannot be trampled. A theory is the best approximation to the fact we’ve got, and when we’re satisfied with it we see the two as interchangable, so a theory ought not be trampled. Something not in accordance with the theory is an indication that the theory needs improvement, not that the event clashes with reality.

This is the part where it all gets mixed up. Religions are all attempts at seeing an order in the universe, and the earliest religions almost always developed out of the same curiosity as sciences. Folks saw the wind, didn’t know about air pressure, but knew thwy could blow or suck in air, so they though maybe a giant fella is making it. Earthquakes rumble the earth, and we can rumble a small area if we jump around, so this must be due to some guy down below. Investigating beyond this most obvious answer is how sciences did start. On the other hand, sciences can take a religious tone. If you come up with a theory that’s consistent with itself and a few facts outside it, but provides absolutely no avenues to prove itself, i.e. predictions that can be tested, there’s very little value in that. Spending years and years tinkering with the maths of a theory explaining the most minute parts of the universe to come up with experiments that might be possible in a century is certainly bordering on a religion experience. Same with constantly trying to break from the standard model to find new things that change everything. But this is getting off-track and this isn’t a call-out post. Let’s take a step back and see what the author considers religion to be:

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. This involves two distinct criteria:

1. Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product of human whims or agreements. Professional football is not a religion, because despite its many laws, rites and often bizarre rituals, everyone knows that human beings invented football themselves, and FIFA may at any moment enlarge the size of the goal or cancel the offside rule.

2. Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that it considers binding. Many Westerners today believe in ghosts, fairies and reincarnation, but these beliefs are not a source of moral and behavioural standards. As such, they do not constitute a religion.

My biggest issue here is that guy’s supposed to be a historian, meaning he should have the training and proclivity to read any number of texts of how religions developed. Yet, he chooses to go with a purely descriptive definition. He doesn’t even use more specific language like Eco with fascism (which also suffers from trying to define based on characteristics instead of how it came about) so much so that you could arguably use this definition to call the family a religion. For small children, the parents are essentially superhuman, they create an order beyond the kids’ understanding. Same with government, if a policy is in the interest of and desired by 90% of the population and yet not implemented, how is this not a superhuman order? I admit that latter one is a bit flimsy, but that’s the natural result of careless descriptive definitions.