Come on, this is needless.
No it isn't. It's perhaps the most important point in the thread.
If anyone hopes to answer the subject-line question about whether "religion" does more harm than good, then they (and their readers) will need to have a reasonably effective way to distinguish between religion and not-religion. That distinction is going to be even more relevant to the second (and rather different) question contained in the original post, about whether "religion" still retains any function in this day and age, or whether it has become redundant. The idea of redundancy suggests that traditional religious functions have been taken over and replaced by non-religious concepts and practices, and that once again presupposes that we can clearly distinguish what is and isn't religious.
You know what he means by religion
If I did, I wouldn't have raised the question. I don't know, and what's more, I don't think that either you or he does either.
Many atheists often seem to believe that there's a clear and distinct boundary between what's religious and what's non-religious. (Religion is identified with the Christianity of their youth that they've rejected.) My own view is that the religion/non-religion distinction is so vague as to nearly useless.
The distinction may seem to fairly obvious when the atheists' target is Christianity and Christian churches, as it so often is. It's fairly easy to extend that to include Judaism and Islam. But what about Confucianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism or Shinto? If we imagine that religion is defined by belief in 'God', then what are we to make of polytheistic or non-theistic religions? If religion is defined by explicit theological doctrines and by scriptures, and by explicitly religious buildings and organizations, what are we to make of all the many 'indigenous' 'tribal' religions around the world where religious practice isn't really distinguished from secular life at all? Where does ancient 'paganism' fit into all this? What about things like Hermeticism and the Western Occult Tradition? Is Alchemy religious? What about 19'th century Spiritualism with its seances hoping to contact the dead?
and he's certainly not including things that aren't religions by any definition
But that's the point -- what definition of 'religion' are we supposed to be using? (And why should everyone else use that particular definition?)
My assertion is that the meaning of the word 'religion' is like the meaning of many ordinary language words like 'good' or 'beauty'. It's a fuzzy and ill-defined concept, particularly at the edges, when we aren't just talking about paradigm cases. These kind of things are more a matter of family-resemblance than they are a matter of precise technical definition. Different instances of 'religion' will resemble other instances in some ways, but not in every way. All that's required for the same word to be applied in more than one instance is that the various instances share enough characteristics in common that they sufficiently resemble each other. (How much resemblance satisfies 'sufficient' is once again ill-defined and something of a matter of taste.) But the thing is, it's possible that there may not be any single definitive characteristic that all instances of 'religion' share in common.
Freudianism certainly seems to be a theory of mental suffering that prescribes a practice that supposedly alleviates that suffering and promises peace. That's basically what Buddhism does. The Christian ideas of sin and salvation aren't unrelated.
or non-supernatural philosophical idealism.
Philosophical idealism would seem to be supernaturalistic by its very nature, since it attempts to reduce the universe of physical existence to ideas and perceptions existing in what must be disembodied and transcendental minds. That's basically the same line that Hindu Vedanta takes. Absolute idealism goes on to assume that all of our individual viewpoints are ultimately gathered together into a single unconditioned viewpoint very much like (and in some cases perhaps modeled from) Christianity's monotheistic God. That's the approach that Shankara's Advaita Vedanta takes, and the religious goal in that species of Hinduism is to ultimately merge one's illusory individual self back into the monistic Godhead. The Neoplatonists of late antiquity similarly sought union with the One from which they believed our world of multiplicity and dualistic distinctions originally emanated..
The rest is worth discussing, but this is just obfuscation.
Call it whatever you like, but I think that considering these kind of issues (they are familiar ones in the philosophy of religion and religious-studies) might just help some of our atheists raise their rhetoric to new levels of sophistication.
