What Religion Is

Today we had a good session in the research seminar that I coordinate aimed at writing an article in which we show the benefits of the Decoupling Theory for the study of religion.
Alexandra presented a case study in which she talked about the heritage of Romanticism in our modern discourses, in particular in the representation of the data collected by the Hubble telescope.

Again the discussion landed (for some time) on the question of what religion is, and as always it was a heated discussion, because we find problematic even the category of 'religion', let alone knowing what is the content of this concept.

I remembered how easily Yuval Harari talks about religion, its role as a cohesive force in the society (talking about the narratives of religion only), how the present religion is humanism, how buddhism is not a religion etc., as if this concept has a very clear meaning. His claim is that humanism is the religion of our days.

I also want to call into attention (yes, your attention) what Barend said two meetings ago, which happen to be EXACTLY what I am teaching in my culture and cognition course, that religion directs the person into what he should believe, away from experiencing reality (actuality, as he calls it) into the culturally accepted repertoire.
When I teach it I call it Seal of the Semiosphere; this expression refers to God as the ultimate confirmator of the culture. But Barend's approach, which I second, goes back to what my mother told me about religion, which is: Religion is the social institution that takes the authority of confirming what the semiosphere is.
She did not use these words, but her definition, or description of what religion is, certainly started with the words "Religion is a social institution", this is to say - not an organization, but an institute.
So instead of relating to the content of religion, while trying to define it, relating to its role seems to make more sense, and end up in using the concept 'religion' in an analytic manner. Even cultures that don't have 'religion' as a separate social organization, have this function of a seal, a 'shtemple' confirming what our culture actually is.
To be sure the socialization and the message of what the culture is, is given by many parts of the society, starting with parents, kindergarten teachers, friends, dr. Phils etc., and they cannot all be called 'religion'. But when there is an institution that does this (the confirmation, I mean), it is religion, or can be called religion.

Narratives We Live By - Self, Society, and Cosmos in Human Cognition

The aim of this book is to study the place of narratives in human cognition. It searches for the motivation for creating narratives, and the type of cognition that narratives both create and represent. Narrating reality is a way of presenting people with a meaningful self and a meaningful environment. There are other ways of representing reality, other types of cognition which makes the environment meaningful, but the narrative one bears a certain character which makes it unique; the uniqueness of narrative cognition is in its use of anthropomorphism, its use of the person, anthropos, human, as a focal point, around whom events are happening, and thus presenting reality in 'human size', so to speak.

In the first stage we will study why humans tell stories, to recognize which problem is solved by telling stories. I will then seek the neural and cognitive mechanisms which enable the representing of reality as a story. The major part of the book is dedicated to looking at major narrative humans live by, narratives about self, society, and the cosmos, both ancient and modern.