Surveying religious belief needs social science not hard science

[patrice]

3. I usually have trouble with the word "religion" and I don't find "spirituality" much better.

I don't like "religion", because it implies some kind of externally imposed form of authoritarian order/organization/institutionalization, which, while not necessarily intrinsically 100% in error in and of itself, cannot encompass all of the variations in relationships between individuals and their best/truest approximations of reality/truth (as in "I am the way, the truth and the life ...", which, if you look at the whole story of the life of Jesus, I regard as a call to BE the truth yourself, to live it all of the time). Religion, by its emphasis upon organization, discounts the relatively unique perspective encoded into each person, then, people come to habitually ignore it and, thus, make mistakes that add up to things like the Holocaust or inquisitions against various others, or un-necessary wars based on lies about entire nations of INNOCENT Muslims.

"Spirituality" on the other hand seems to imply absolutely anything you want, which I think is also a high-probability of error.

Maybe I just don't see the necessity of having a different sort of word for a basic instinct to relate to whatever is. Many people would refer to that as "knowing" and I'm pretty comfortable with that since I know there are different kinds of knowing. For example, I know that quantum physics is true, but I, currently, know that in a different kind of way from how I know that this cup of coffee is too cold.