AFAICT, she has taken that sense of 'religion' and broadened it even furhter. However, the real point here is that she is equivocating between different senses of 'religion'.Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Leyla's terminology is actually quite common in the fields of sociology, anthropology, comparative religion and such.
Communism was a civic religion in this sense, for example. It had an established set of beliefs and practices, though ostensibly no metaphysical content. However, to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all species of nationalism beggars credulity -- and of course the subsequent equivocation adds injury tot he insult.
I will thank you to point out any place where I claimed that the concept of civic religion is anti-semitic.It's not necessarily related to anything racist or antisemitic. Such accusations are just based in ignorance or perhaps the presence of an overarching agenda or paranoia.
My argument is that the way Leyla abuses it -- in an unsound argument aimed to discredit zionism -- is anti-semitic, not the concept itself.
And one has to look at the fact that religions accomplish those ends by providing people with a fairly fixed set of beliefs about the world. If you are looking at similarities, then also note the differences -- metaphysical religion and civic religion may be related, in that both provide social coherence, but they also differ in critical respects, because civil religion doesn't entail a hierarchy of authoritative belief-givers and belief-interpreters, and thus results in a very different forms and applications of its resultant social cohesion.It's not moot to suggest that all nationalism is religious in nature. This just attempts to highlight the commonalities, how people can die for god as well as country, or both. It's about sacrifice, what one is willing to sacrifice to belong to something, be part of something. Or how to be motivated to do so. This is perhaps not the same type of religion as a collection of intense personal, transcendent experiences which are then categorized as being 'such and such'. But really, if religion needs a definition that captures its essence, one needs to look at its specific function, how it works in groups, how it's named and turned into banners.
OK, let me try this.This process of describing is really useful, like when seeing the religious in what is claimed to be non-religious.
Fish have flippers. Dolphins have flippers. Ergo, they belong to the same biological taxon!
How am I doing?
See? You couldn't help yourself. Same equivocation as Leyla practices. First you speak of religion in the broadest possible sense, as simply a sort of social glue -- and then, once you think you established your point, boom! accusations of faith strike. Believing in a sky daddy and believing in your nation -- same shit, different social order!Which prepares the way for seeing how behind advanced wording very primitive and barely developed, innate images can hide. Or how any 'advanced' civilization might not be so mature philosophically as it thinks it is - as it's still bowing down for old clay gods wearing new [straight] jackets.
You people have internalized this sort of argument by definitional equivocation. You can't fucking help yourself, you can't avoid deploying it, you don't even recognize when you do so. You think just because you managed to connect two different things to the same word, differently defined, that you have suddenly proven an important relationship between those things.
Pathetic.