"Religion" and unicorns

Bruce Lincoln: “Religion . . . is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent.” ...  “History, in the sharpest possible contrast, is that discourse which speaks of things temporal and terrestrial.”

Timothy Fitzgerald: This is a God-like generalization that transcends historical inquiry. Religion in itself is nothing. It is a highly contested construct and requires contextualized, historical unpacking. This is not a critical practice; it is a statement, or a pair of statements, of the kind “Unicorns have one horn” and “Bligs have three tongues.”

Timothy Fitzgerald, “Bruce Lincoln’s‘ Theses on Method’: Antitheses,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18, no. 4 (2006): 402–403.

Sekularismen är religiös!

The anthropologist Brian Morris, in the introduction to his book Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987), says that "the rubric 'religion', to me, covers all phenomena that are seen as having a sacred or supra-empirical quality: totemism, myth, witchcraft, ritual, spirit beliefs, symbolism, and the rest".

Now it occurs to me that all values are supraempirical, and if we include as values the American Constitution, the rights of man, and the concept of the civil society, then religion in Morris's usage covers what defines secular western society. In point of fact Morris's usage tends to make 'religion' identical with ritual, thus including many institutions that others would like to label secular.

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Timothy Fitzgerald. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford University Pres, 2003. s. 12