Originally Posted by kerry edwards

Part of the problem in the discussion is to identify what is 'religion' and what is 'culture' or 'ethnic practice'. Anyone want to make a stab at it? I've seen people use the distinction utilizing the content of a 'text' as the 'real' religion and any non-textually sanctioned practice as 'culture'. Also seen the same thing with 'law' in the place of 'text'. Neither of those seem completely satisfactory to me.
Part of the problem in my view is that people use a modern (Western?) experience of religion and project it onto all religion. The modern experience makes religion private, individual, and a non-legal component of society. This doesn't fit cultures which had very little private, individual, non-legally regulated space for 'religion'.
So, we can look at Lamas and say, that is culture and not religion or we can look at Bishops in medieval Europe and say their political power was cultural and not religious, but I don't think it's very helpful because it assumes that our experience of 'religion' is definitive. It might be more helpful to start out by saying that religion does not exist any more and what we call 'religion' is just an ersatz private indulgence tolerated in modern society in a similar way that black powder pistols are unregulated. They're both outdated and inaccurate, so useless in achieving power in modern cultural combat, that they can be functionally ignored.