How could we do this?  By looking at the society "Pre-religion" and the society "post religion" since they seem to have had a sudden explosion from a fairly wooly "pantheism" (not, of course, to be confused with the rather more robust pantheism of the Hindu's)  to a rather more concrete and well defined "monotheism".

Of these, the most historically recent would be Islam and this might perhaps be easiest to identify "pre-Islamic" cultural features that were then "adopted" into Islam and which "Islamic" features were _not_ present pre-Muhammed* and which were then exported as part of the package to different parts of the world.

That all seems like rather a lot of effort though and frankly it's easier to be a bit obtuse and say "When enough people believe it, religion becomes culture" rather than addressing the rather more important question of what's the difference between a religion and a culture?

If there _is_ a demonstrable difference between a religion and a culture than the statement is supportable.

If there _isn't_ a demonstrable difference than the whole debate becomes (even more) pointless.

Sorry, am I spoiling people's fun again?

Actually, that's the (or rather a) dictionary definition, not one I made up randomly. Or do you want to argue with that definition too? I doubt you will, you haven't bothered to address any of the other sources I've used to prove my case.

And as i've pointed out before: You never asked for primary causes at all, so don't try and hide behind your "correlation and causation" argument. You wanted things that were Religious, and Bad. I've given examples, I've backed up my examples... where is your counter? Where is your example of a significant group of muslims who practise sharia but regard it as non-divine? Or any other counter that would show sharia isn't considered divine?

Have you actually got anyway to disprove my point? As it seems to me your argument is "No it isn't" but without any justification of why that is the case.

  I'm not convinced that those points are entirely representative of all Sharia-supporting Muslims, because they seem to be aimed at explaining Sharia to Western people who don't know very much about it but would like a quick two-minute summary.  That's a reasonable thing for someone to try to do, but I don't think it's likely to completely illuminate the situation at the level that's relevant here.  If I were trying to explain Christianity to someone who knew very little about it, and we had two minutes, then I wouldn't be surprised if they walked away with an opinion of Christianity that was very different to what most Christians actually think (although they might be less ignorant than they had been before our conversation).  Under these circumstances, I'm wary about coming to a conclusion about what Sharia-supporting Muslims believe without having access to a larger amount of evidence.  We could settle this by waiting for six months while I go off and read up on Sharia- until then, I think it's reasonable for me to be sceptical about any source which says "Sharia is very very simple, and it works like this"- because while such sources may be a useful starting point, the reality of the situation is likely to be more complicated.

  It seems clear that Sharia-supporters think that Sharia is intimately connected to Islam (or at least, I'd be quite surprised to find that they didn't.  But if it turned out, hypothetically, that Sharia-supporters think that EVERYTHING good is intimately connected to Islam, then this would suggest that they see religion in a different way to how I see it (since I believe that it's a good idea for the legislative system to aim to be secular- I suspect that they believe that a secular legislative system is both impossible and an idea which is being pushed by Satanists.  I don't actually *know* that they believe that- but it's one example of a way in which their concept of religion could differ from mine.  If their concept of religion does differ from mine, then saying "it's obvious that they believe it's religious" is not a helpful statement.)

  I'm aware of the concept, but I can't help but feel that it presents greater problems in some situations than in others.  If I have a calm face-to-face conversation in English with someone I've known well for ten years, then I might come away with an innaccurate perception of what they believe, but I think I've got a reasonable chance of grasping what they're saying.  If I try to decipher something written a thousand years ago, in a completely foreign language, by people whose belief system is extinct, who were aiming their message at people who were intimately familiar with the context and hence didn't need any introductory summaries- then I think my chances of understanding what they're saying is lower, especially regarding complex abstract issues like their concept of religion.

  What sort of counter-evidence would you consider to be acceptable to back up the position that the evidence is uncertain?  For example, I can try to find a quote from an archaeologist that says "it is often difficult to be completely confident about a conclusion based on archaeological evidence, especially if you're looking at something abstract and complex like a belief system, so we need to remain sceptical about possible interpretations of the evidence".  Would that satisfy you? 

  Actually, I think it's quite a sensible tactic in a debate which hinges on historical evidence.  What if I said to you "Jesus was definitely the son of God because the Bible says he is, and the Bible is a historical document"?  I'd expect you to reply with something like "but how can Biblical historians really know that the events described in the Gospels really took place in the way they say they did?"

  Proving whether people lived in a place is the sort of question that archaeology is quite good at answering, because it's a debate which hinges largely on physical evidence (e.g., have we found middens from that period in the area yet?)  Despite this, I understand that there are still debates over whether a particular ruin was built for people to live in, or as a monument which people travelled to from a different place.  The question of whether people lived in castles is a relatively easy one, though, because of the unusually large amount of historical data which has been passed down uninterrupted in the few hundred years since people stopped building castles.  If I came from a culture which turned up in Britain and found an illiterate population and some weird abandoned ruins which the locals called 'castles' and said were built by ancestors who were descended from the gods- then in that case I think it would be reasonable for me to consider several possible theories about what the original purpose of castles had actually been.

  Oh, bother.  I'm only a BSc in anthropology (about to start MA in September).  That means he has a higher rank in Sociocultural Pedantry than I do, so I should probably concede defeat right now.

  That's a very odd analogy which I haven't heard anywhere else, and I'm not sure how to interpret it.  It sounds almost like he's saying that culture, like the brain, is a solid thing, whereas religion, like the mind, is an artificial concept which we've made up in order to simplify things (since the mind doesn't exist except in the sense that many chemical reactions in the brain add up to a process which we've decided to call 'mind' because it's a convenient shortcut).  If that's what he's arguing, then I don't immediately understand why he'd think that, unless he's one of the anthropologists who prefer to study material culture rather than schemas (i.e. they prefer to analyse solid things which people make, like cups and swords and tapestries, rather than the abstract ideas which inspired those things).

  If you see him again, can you ask him to explain what he meant by that analogy?  You could try adding that Carrie thinks this debate hinges on the question of whether we're defining 'religious' as an etic or an emic concept.  Kant argued (somewhat ethnocentrically) that post-Englightenmennt cultures believe that 'reason' (i.e. dispassionate secular logic) should be publicly free but privately submissive.  It's my hunch that Sharia-supporters do not emically define 'reason' in the same way that Kant did, and hence they don't agree when we promote the idea that secularising public spaces is the best way to develop a society.

  This is basically the same thing as I've been saying several times already, but if you use the anthropology jargon then it's potentially a bit more succinct and so might get a different response from him.

  As Marios says, this is muddied a bit by the fact that we have more information about one of these belief systems than about the other.  Even if we could get around this difficulty, I'd say that the distinction hinges less on pantheism/ monotheism, per se, and more on whether there's a centralised authority which tries to systematically impose a particular version of doctrine on people.  For example, I understand that in the Meiji era the Japanese government tried to promote a version of Shintoism which was more tightly defined and stricter on what counted as a heresy, compared to the looser collection of beliefs which Japanese people had held before- but the new Shintoism was still polytheist (I may have some of the details of that wrong, though, it's not a topic I know masses about).

  I do remember hearing that one specific difference about Arabia pre and post-Islam is that before Islam Arabic women couldn't inherit any property from their fathers, whereas under Islamic law they can.  I don't know what evidence this is based on, though.

And you started banging on about causation...

Quite simply, you moved on to a different argument (religious as the CAUSE of these things) and I stuck to the original thing I thought we were debating (an example of religion as control/bad).

ANYWAY, does that now put on the same track?? You don't just want "religion = bad" examples, you want "Religion = root cause of bad" examples?

  Fair enough.

  Thanks.

  Ok, putting the definition problem to one side for the time being (although I still think it's an important question which is yet to be resolved), I have a couple of issues with that approach.

1)  I think that on one level, it makes sense to say that religion is used to control people- but on another level, it isn't a very useful statement because virtually *everything* cultural is used to control people, one way or another.  For example, science is used to control people- scientists use science as a way to demand that the public should shut up and pay attention to their opinions on the world.