How’s about I coin the term “confiction”? It’s like an explicit version of what “faith” obviously indicates in a religious setting: a conviction in something that’s not demonstrably so.
Yes… my revised definition of “religion” is this:
A system of confictions wherein outsiders are led to believe (and it is true for the majority of adherents) that adherents sincerely believe the confictions.
I think this is pretty much watertight now… gotta make sure and catch those Buddhist fantasists within the fantasist label “religion”, eh?
I’m dead serious, by the way, in this sense: I think this is the most accurate simple description one can have of a religion: it’s a faith-based (not evidence-based) system adhered to by a group of people who look to all the World as they sincerely believe (some because they are sharky charlatans, others because they have had their credulity abused) those things for which they use faith and not evidence.
Now… can anybody say why my usage of “confiction” and proposed usage of “religion” doesn’t do a better job of defining what a religion is than most you’ll find in a dictionary? My suspicion as to why nobody has defined it plainly for what it is is for fear of causing offense… but the fact is that you can’t have a religion without unsupported dogma… if any claim were demonstrably the case then you’d be doing science, not religion… religion is, even if you have to understand that I’m using a slightly unusual take on what “make-believe” can mean, essentially all about make-believe… it’s all about believing things (or seeming to believe things) that have no cogent demonstration of the truth of them.