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This is a bullet that I bit a long time ago. The “religion vs. ideology” distinction is fake, and is a result of Enlightenment thinkers who believed, incorrectly, that humanity could rise above religion and replace it with something fundamentally different that would act as a coordination mechanism for society. I think that on a primal evolutionary level, anything that can function as a large-scale non-physically-coercive coordination mechanism for non-kin individuals is indistinguishable from a religion. Whether or not one decides to deploy discussion of transcendent/supernatural elements as a rhetorical device is irrelevant to the underlying structure of the coordination mechanism.
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