Every religion will be constituted to some degree around distinct answers to those questions - what religion is, what purposes it serves, what if any institutional forms it should take. So every answer will imply or connect to a presupposition about religion, and any presupposition about religion is a religious presupposition, and of the Christian should vs a Jewish should vs a Buddhist should vs a secular-liberal should, etc., as understood in diverse contexts. The difficulty of answering the questions in the abstract, as though once and for all time, or of trusting answers we come up with, leads people (all people?) to religious ideologies with answers largely in place and questions usefully limited. Another option is simply observing what people do and say and trying to interpret it, or interpreting ourselves in relation to it.

bob:
I guess it’s the “all religions” part – I’ve contested the God characteriztion for Buddhism I thought well enough to merit mention of the contesting. Iprobably should have just spit it out.

Right, but the statement is about the presumption of the truth of the monotheistic ontology, from its own perspective, as not merely a theory or discourse about being, but as a discourse true to being or in a sense prior to all subsequent statements about possible being. So it has already pre-defined all possibly contradictory discourses as defective to the extent they are contradictory. It has already defined all religion that rises to the level of religion as being about "God." To the extent that it takes animism or Buddhism or atheism seriously, as potentially in conflict or contradiction rather than merely irrelevant, then it will locate signs or masks or telltale gaps that speak to functions or attributes of the god concept within the presumed true monotheistic ontological account.

cont'd below

Mr. Likko at the linked post delves into the constitutional legal framework, but there are differences of opinion over the implications of what the NC people are seeking. They would in no way acknowledge that they are rejecting the Constitution as a whole: The original Nullificationists didn't do that: They claimed to be upholding the Constitution against unconstitutional federal acts, and even the Confederates believed that Secession from the Constituted US of A ought to be acceptable. The local-establishers believe the Constitution, even after the Civil War amendments, ought to allow their version of Free Exercise. I'm not sure how far they've gotten into Supreme Court jurisprudence, whether it should or whether it does, two different things, bar them from what they're doing.

Establishing their version of Christianity is a government intervention, Don Miguel. So this is at minimum intramural govt v govt action.

Possibly in that thar comment, not sure of where else. In other words I'm not sure what you mean.

Well, the beginning of this conversation is the notion that a bunch of wanna-be establishers are trying to do just that - talk about religion in such a way that it or its tenets could somehow be mandated - and that it's a no-no even in North Carolina. To American universalist liberalism, though it is (or we are) usually careful not to say so, either for fear of giving offense, or (unless it's another way of saying the same thing) because it prefers (we prefer) unconsciousness of its (our) own uniquely religious anti-"religious" inclinations, all pre-modern religion is cultish religion - just as for pre-modern monotheism, including as still very widely practiced or articulated today, there could be one's own true religion and everyone else's false, misleading, dangerous, and in the end evil or damnable would-be religions.

Should add: I think Strauss is right, but by his own admission not wholly right. I wish he had at some point more directly and systematically addressed the Hegelian "impressive synthesis" that he typically observes, but, to my knowledge, does not fully engage on its own terms.

The assertion of "real" is the assertion of objectivity. The counter-claim, that the assertion is merely subjective, is the assertion of an alternative "real" or "true" condition or objectivity, and so would be subject to the same counter-counter-claim, etc. Taken on its own level, the counter-claim simply repeats the initial set of contentions: Miguel answers a claim of subjectivity with a claim of objectivity; one responds to the claim of objectivity with the claim that it is subjective, and so on. We are trapped in the prison-house of language on both sides, though this fact ought to make us wonder how much of the disagreement is, as you were saying earlier, semantic - profoundly so: not just over the meaning of particular words or the relationship of particular words to particular ideas or experiences, but over the possible meaning of words at all in relation to what would be the primary, all-conditioning condition of all ideas and experiences.

I'm having difficulty processing the second paragraph, especially the second sentence regarding mandates, but I believe that another way of framing the same problematic is that a sociological approach to religion, religion as "definable," is never the same as a religious approach to religion from "within" belief. To the sociologist and the "modern" theologian (the theologian or the student of religion in the age of "natural science" or scientism), who is or strives to be impartial, which means professionally unconscious of his or her own true commitments, every religion is a dogma, a doctrine, a subjective approach to objectifiable experiences, a mytho-poetic narrative. For the scientist of religions, religion exists as a phenomenon or large set of phenomena to be understood within a scientific and essentially materialist larger discourse. It would be absurd or anyway unheard of, for the contemporary sociologist as sociologist, to aim to prove that Judaism is superior to Hinduism, or Baptism superior to New Atheism, etc., and much current scholarship consists of faulting previous scholars for having mutilated their own work with such prejudices, conscious or not. For the scientist, religions reduce to facts, experiences, events to be fully historicized and finally fully biologized and physicalized - scientized. To the believer, by primordial contrast, his or her religion is or refers uniquely to the larger truth. It is not merely a "belief system," but the essence, pre-supposition, and pre-condition of belief at all, being at all. Science, or formerly natural philosophy, exists within and after that truth. To treat religion or the religious "object" as anything other than the whole prior to whatever particular is already to commit to the other side.

So, Strauss argued regarding the basic conflict between reason and revelation that "In every attempt at harmonization, in every synthesis no matter how impressive, one of the two opposed elements is sacrificed, more or less subtly, but in any event surely, to the other: philosophy which means to be the queen, must be made the handmaid of revelation or vice versa." ("Reason and Revelation," in Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, p. 150.

Indeed it does.

From the perspective of the truth of the God concept, then all religions are actually about relationship with God, just some are more linguistically or symbolically self-occluded than others.

I'd be interested in hearing more about your take on the difference between pagan hedonism or perhaps eudemonia and postmodern happiness, since I think that within this broad framework they may finally coincide. (Let me know if you'd like to be a contributor here!)

The synthesis we wish for may have to do with the popularity of this: https://twitter.com/KimKierkegaard

Not just a modern definition of happiness, but pagan, too, so to some extent re-enacting or reviving or maybe continuing a very old set of conflicts and displacements.

Agree that it's a matter of semantics, but religion in any form will be "semantical": a doctrine or dogma is a kind of semantic machinery, a system for the attribution of special, intrinsic meanings - including immediate force or realizable power - to particular statements, phrases, and words as well as other signs and symbols.

Could you be more specific about the last group you describe? Whom do you have in mind?