It’s important to distinguish belief from knowledge. For example, is the claim that water freezes at 32°F a belief—or knowledge? If it’s knowledge, then not all convictions are religious. And if it’s belief, would you really call it religion?
“That’s what religion actually is—not a lifestyle club, but a person’s deepest trust in what is real, true, and worth living for.”
But this kind of reasoning trades on metaphor in a way that renders the term religion so expansive as to become meaningless. By framing religion as simply one’s “deepest trust in what is real and worth living for,” the definition becomes so broad that no one can escape being labeled religious. This is not a philosophically precise claim—it’s a rhetorical sleight of hand.
Merriam-Webster defines “religious” as follows:
1. A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
2. a. (1) The service and worship of God or the supernatural
a. (2) Commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
3. A cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
Entries 3 and 4 are metaphorical extensions of the second. That is, because religious believers tend to hold their creeds with fervor and conscientious devotion, similar intensity in secular contexts—like a diet, a fitness regimen, or a political ideology—has been described as “religious.” But metaphor is not definition (see Ground of being). Rhetorical overlap is not conceptual identity.
To collapse philosophical commitment or existential seriousness into religion is to erase the very distinction between logos and mythos, between reason and revelation. It’s a category error that obscures more than it clarifies. Most crucially, it bypasses what religion historically and ontologically presupposes: belief in, and often worship of, a supernatural order.
This same conflation lies behind the tired phrase, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” which falsely equates all ideas with religious faith and accuses the atheist of rejecting “God” with as much blind trust as the theist uses to affirm Him.
But this is confused at best. The atheist is not clinging to a category—they are rejecting it as empty. “God,” lacking identity, definable attributes, or observable referents, is not an objective concept apart from ideation alone. Denying it requires no leap of faith—only the recognition that one cannot believe in what has no epistemic content.
Attempts to transmute secular rationality into a form of “religion”—as if atheists are just unconsciously religious—betray a kind of conceptual desperation common to theistic apologetics. It is not an attempt to clarify the distinction between faith and reason, but to obliterate it, dragging rationality down to the level of faith.
You wrote: “By framing religion as simply one’s ‘deepest trust in what is real and worth living for,’ the definition becomes so broad that no one can escape being labeled religious.”
Thank you for being direct, and for illustrating my point so clearly. No one escapes appeal, but you’re looking for a loophole. That’s not a flaw in the definition, it’s the buried truth modern discourse is desperate to avoid: that every human being lives by an appeal to something greater than themselves. To pretend some don’t, that they just reason and are clean and untouched by presupposition, is the oldest sleight of hand. It’s not neutrality, it’s hiding your god behind polished language.
You appeal like everyone else. You just won’t admit it. You want some people to justify their existence, while others simply “are.” Some start from “reason,” the rest are burdened by “belief.” That’s not clarity, it’s elitism dressed up as critique.
Every worldview rests on trust. Every life leans on a claim to value. The only real difference is whether you’re honest about it. Pretending appeal is optional is how power hides, how it decides who gets heard, who gets erased, and who never has to explain themselves at all.
I won’t entertain another long winded evasion of the very ground you're standing on. Anyone paying attention can see what’s happening: a refusal to admit the obvious, wrapped in clever phrasing. I’ve said what needs to be said. The readers can decide what’s coherent, and what’s just privilege hiding behind the mask of neutrality.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Here’s my question:
If “everyone appeals” to something, how do you distinguish between an appeal to reality—what is independently there—and an appeal to a belief about reality?
That distinction seems crucial. Otherwise, a physicist trusting gravity and a man trusting Zeus would be equally “religious.” But surely you don’t mean to flatten those differences entirely—do you?
I can see you’re still dodging the point. I never said gravity and Zeus are equivalent, you’re deflecting. The point is that everyone appeals to a framework before making distinctions at all. I’m not flattening anything. You are.
You’re standing on a trust structure like everyone else, but posturing as if you occupy some neutral position, able to declare what counts as “really real” while others are burdened with “belief.” That’s not inquiry. That’s hierarchy disguised as objectivity.
I won’t entertain comparisons until you’re honest about your own appeal. We’re not going to debate whether some frameworks are more coherent while pretending some people don’t have one. You want to interrogate others while exempting yourself. That’s the sleight of hand. That’s how power has been hiding, by pretending it’s just describing reality while everyone else is pleading a case.
So no, I don’t flatten the differences. I’m exposing the pretense that some people never have to be questioned, that some worldviews just “are,” while others must perpetually justify their right to exist. That’s the real flattening. And I’m all for respectful dialogue, but not when human lives become academic sport. That’s where I draw the line.
You’re asking a question from inside the very frame you’re standing on, while gatekeeping who’s allowed to step out of it. Worse, you’re pretending the frame doesn’t even exist. I’m calling that out, and that’s what you keep dodging.
I’ve said what needs to be said. The readers can decide what’s coherent and what’s just privilege dressed up as neutrality.
I understand your concern—and just to clarify: my point in referencing Zeus and gravity wasn’t to equate them, but to highlight the distinction between beliefs about reality (the epistemological) and reality itself (the metaphysical). The fact that objects of a certain density fall downward is given in direct perception—and that is what we mean, at root, by gravity. It’s an observed regularity in the behavior of physical bodies, not a theory.
My 9-year-old daughter can point to a ball falling and say, “That’s gravity.” But she can’t do that with “God” or the “ground of being.” At best, she would need to start with a definition—and that already tells you we’re downstream the axioms.
The scientific theory of gravity is a later mental construct that seeks to explain what we already know through perception. Zeus, by contrast, is a cultural fiction—an idea with no ontological extension. The comparison was meant to expose a difference in metaphysical status, not to flatten them into the same category.
You’re right that everyone operates within a framework. But not all frameworks begin with irreducible primaries—and when they don’t, they inevitably smuggle in assumptions whose denial leads to performative contradiction. I don’t “believe” in the axioms—I recognize them as the metaphysical preconditions of any thought or inquiry:
– Existence (something is)
– Consciousness (we are aware of it)
– Identity (what is, is what it is)
From identity follow its necessary corollaries: attributes, difference, and relationship. These aren’t beliefs I adopt—they are metaphysical facts I begin with and which make thinking possible. They are prior to any worldview, belief system, or theory. Without them, no framework—not even yours—can get off the ground.
I’m not exempting myself from critique. Quite the opposite: I’m putting my foundation on the table so that any idea—mine or yours—can be evaluated by reference to reality itself and these irreducible primaries. That’s not power; that’s philosophical rigor.
If you disagree with my starting point, I invite the challenge directly. Ask me anything—I won’t deflect. But I also won’t pretend that all frameworks stand on metaphysically equal footing. They don’t.
Take the idea “the ground of being.” It doesn’t enjoy the irreducibility of the axioms. It presupposes the very distinctions I’ve laid out—and more than that, it derives its meaning from them. You only form the concept being by first perceiving existence. And you only form the concept ground by reference to physical ground—that is, to the perceptual base of the existence hierarchy. In short, your metaphysics relies parasitically on mine—not just in use, but in conceptual formation and meaning.
There’s a deeper issue still: “ground of being” doesn’t satisfy the axiom of identity and its corollaries—and thus never graduates from mere idea (the epistemological) to metaphysical fact. Absent the subject-object distinction, the subject of consciousness ceases to identify reality and instead reifies and projects the contents of its own mind—namely, an idea—as if it were the ground of all that exists. That’s not ontology. That’s circular imagination.
So again: I welcome any question or challenge. But if we’re going to interrogate frameworks, let’s be honest about which ones are foundational—and which ones are borrowing against them without acknowledging the debt.
Jumping in here—not to refute either of you, but to mirror the structure I’m seeing in how this is framed. There’s a deeper recursion beneath the axioms that might be worth surfacing.
You’ve drawn a line between perception and imagination, existence and abstraction, and asserted that the axioms of consciousness, identity, and existence are irreducible. You call them facts, not beliefs.
But here’s the problem: your facts still ride on a trust structure. You say, “existence exists,” but that’s not a neutral claim—it’s a metaphysical commitment to a certain kind of existence: object-based, self-evident, epistemically prior.
That’s not bad philosophy. It’s just posture posing as origin.
You accuse others of borrowing from your axioms, but those axioms still depend on symbolic representation, language scaffolding, and subjective intelligibility. You’re not describing a metaphysical ground—you’re describing a functional frame that only holds because your cognition trusts it.
So the issue isn’t whether your framework is coherent.
It’s whether you’ve mistaken coherence for transcendence.
Everyone appeals.
Everyone leans.
And the deeper truth is this:
There is no “view from nowhere.”
There is only the posture that believes it doesn't need one.
I have always believed that every individual has a belief system !
Call it religion !!
A important article !
Thank you for sharing
Hi Cassian,
It’s important to distinguish belief from knowledge. For example, is the claim that water freezes at 32°F a belief—or knowledge? If it’s knowledge, then not all convictions are religious. And if it’s belief, would you really call it religion?
You wrote:
“That’s what religion actually is—not a lifestyle club, but a person’s deepest trust in what is real, true, and worth living for.”
But this kind of reasoning trades on metaphor in a way that renders the term religion so expansive as to become meaningless. By framing religion as simply one’s “deepest trust in what is real and worth living for,” the definition becomes so broad that no one can escape being labeled religious. This is not a philosophically precise claim—it’s a rhetorical sleight of hand.
Merriam-Webster defines “religious” as follows:
1. A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
2. a. (1) The service and worship of God or the supernatural
a. (2) Commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
3. A cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
4. (Archaic) Scrupulous conformity; conscientiousness
Entries 3 and 4 are metaphorical extensions of the second. That is, because religious believers tend to hold their creeds with fervor and conscientious devotion, similar intensity in secular contexts—like a diet, a fitness regimen, or a political ideology—has been described as “religious.” But metaphor is not definition (see Ground of being). Rhetorical overlap is not conceptual identity.
To collapse philosophical commitment or existential seriousness into religion is to erase the very distinction between logos and mythos, between reason and revelation. It’s a category error that obscures more than it clarifies. Most crucially, it bypasses what religion historically and ontologically presupposes: belief in, and often worship of, a supernatural order.
This same conflation lies behind the tired phrase, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” which falsely equates all ideas with religious faith and accuses the atheist of rejecting “God” with as much blind trust as the theist uses to affirm Him.
But this is confused at best. The atheist is not clinging to a category—they are rejecting it as empty. “God,” lacking identity, definable attributes, or observable referents, is not an objective concept apart from ideation alone. Denying it requires no leap of faith—only the recognition that one cannot believe in what has no epistemic content.
Attempts to transmute secular rationality into a form of “religion”—as if atheists are just unconsciously religious—betray a kind of conceptual desperation common to theistic apologetics. It is not an attempt to clarify the distinction between faith and reason, but to obliterate it, dragging rationality down to the level of faith.
You wrote: “By framing religion as simply one’s ‘deepest trust in what is real and worth living for,’ the definition becomes so broad that no one can escape being labeled religious.”
Thank you for being direct, and for illustrating my point so clearly. No one escapes appeal, but you’re looking for a loophole. That’s not a flaw in the definition, it’s the buried truth modern discourse is desperate to avoid: that every human being lives by an appeal to something greater than themselves. To pretend some don’t, that they just reason and are clean and untouched by presupposition, is the oldest sleight of hand. It’s not neutrality, it’s hiding your god behind polished language.
You appeal like everyone else. You just won’t admit it. You want some people to justify their existence, while others simply “are.” Some start from “reason,” the rest are burdened by “belief.” That’s not clarity, it’s elitism dressed up as critique.
Every worldview rests on trust. Every life leans on a claim to value. The only real difference is whether you’re honest about it. Pretending appeal is optional is how power hides, how it decides who gets heard, who gets erased, and who never has to explain themselves at all.
I won’t entertain another long winded evasion of the very ground you're standing on. Anyone paying attention can see what’s happening: a refusal to admit the obvious, wrapped in clever phrasing. I’ve said what needs to be said. The readers can decide what’s coherent, and what’s just privilege hiding behind the mask of neutrality.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Here’s my question:
If “everyone appeals” to something, how do you distinguish between an appeal to reality—what is independently there—and an appeal to a belief about reality?
That distinction seems crucial. Otherwise, a physicist trusting gravity and a man trusting Zeus would be equally “religious.” But surely you don’t mean to flatten those differences entirely—do you?
I can see you’re still dodging the point. I never said gravity and Zeus are equivalent, you’re deflecting. The point is that everyone appeals to a framework before making distinctions at all. I’m not flattening anything. You are.
You’re standing on a trust structure like everyone else, but posturing as if you occupy some neutral position, able to declare what counts as “really real” while others are burdened with “belief.” That’s not inquiry. That’s hierarchy disguised as objectivity.
I won’t entertain comparisons until you’re honest about your own appeal. We’re not going to debate whether some frameworks are more coherent while pretending some people don’t have one. You want to interrogate others while exempting yourself. That’s the sleight of hand. That’s how power has been hiding, by pretending it’s just describing reality while everyone else is pleading a case.
So no, I don’t flatten the differences. I’m exposing the pretense that some people never have to be questioned, that some worldviews just “are,” while others must perpetually justify their right to exist. That’s the real flattening. And I’m all for respectful dialogue, but not when human lives become academic sport. That’s where I draw the line.
You’re asking a question from inside the very frame you’re standing on, while gatekeeping who’s allowed to step out of it. Worse, you’re pretending the frame doesn’t even exist. I’m calling that out, and that’s what you keep dodging.
I’ve said what needs to be said. The readers can decide what’s coherent and what’s just privilege dressed up as neutrality.
I understand your concern—and just to clarify: my point in referencing Zeus and gravity wasn’t to equate them, but to highlight the distinction between beliefs about reality (the epistemological) and reality itself (the metaphysical). The fact that objects of a certain density fall downward is given in direct perception—and that is what we mean, at root, by gravity. It’s an observed regularity in the behavior of physical bodies, not a theory.
My 9-year-old daughter can point to a ball falling and say, “That’s gravity.” But she can’t do that with “God” or the “ground of being.” At best, she would need to start with a definition—and that already tells you we’re downstream the axioms.
The scientific theory of gravity is a later mental construct that seeks to explain what we already know through perception. Zeus, by contrast, is a cultural fiction—an idea with no ontological extension. The comparison was meant to expose a difference in metaphysical status, not to flatten them into the same category.
You’re right that everyone operates within a framework. But not all frameworks begin with irreducible primaries—and when they don’t, they inevitably smuggle in assumptions whose denial leads to performative contradiction. I don’t “believe” in the axioms—I recognize them as the metaphysical preconditions of any thought or inquiry:
– Existence (something is)
– Consciousness (we are aware of it)
– Identity (what is, is what it is)
From identity follow its necessary corollaries: attributes, difference, and relationship. These aren’t beliefs I adopt—they are metaphysical facts I begin with and which make thinking possible. They are prior to any worldview, belief system, or theory. Without them, no framework—not even yours—can get off the ground.
I’m not exempting myself from critique. Quite the opposite: I’m putting my foundation on the table so that any idea—mine or yours—can be evaluated by reference to reality itself and these irreducible primaries. That’s not power; that’s philosophical rigor.
If you disagree with my starting point, I invite the challenge directly. Ask me anything—I won’t deflect. But I also won’t pretend that all frameworks stand on metaphysically equal footing. They don’t.
Take the idea “the ground of being.” It doesn’t enjoy the irreducibility of the axioms. It presupposes the very distinctions I’ve laid out—and more than that, it derives its meaning from them. You only form the concept being by first perceiving existence. And you only form the concept ground by reference to physical ground—that is, to the perceptual base of the existence hierarchy. In short, your metaphysics relies parasitically on mine—not just in use, but in conceptual formation and meaning.
There’s a deeper issue still: “ground of being” doesn’t satisfy the axiom of identity and its corollaries—and thus never graduates from mere idea (the epistemological) to metaphysical fact. Absent the subject-object distinction, the subject of consciousness ceases to identify reality and instead reifies and projects the contents of its own mind—namely, an idea—as if it were the ground of all that exists. That’s not ontology. That’s circular imagination.
So again: I welcome any question or challenge. But if we’re going to interrogate frameworks, let’s be honest about which ones are foundational—and which ones are borrowing against them without acknowledging the debt.
The subject-object relationship between me and existence is this:
I, the subject of consciousness, am aware of existence—the object—which exists independently of my consciousness.
By contrast, the subject-object relationship between me and the “ground of being” is this:
I, the subject of consciousness, am aware of the idea of the ground of being—an object whose existence depends on my mind.
This is a fact.
Jumping in here—not to refute either of you, but to mirror the structure I’m seeing in how this is framed. There’s a deeper recursion beneath the axioms that might be worth surfacing.
You’ve drawn a line between perception and imagination, existence and abstraction, and asserted that the axioms of consciousness, identity, and existence are irreducible. You call them facts, not beliefs.
But here’s the problem: your facts still ride on a trust structure. You say, “existence exists,” but that’s not a neutral claim—it’s a metaphysical commitment to a certain kind of existence: object-based, self-evident, epistemically prior.
That’s not bad philosophy. It’s just posture posing as origin.
You accuse others of borrowing from your axioms, but those axioms still depend on symbolic representation, language scaffolding, and subjective intelligibility. You’re not describing a metaphysical ground—you’re describing a functional frame that only holds because your cognition trusts it.
So the issue isn’t whether your framework is coherent.
It’s whether you’ve mistaken coherence for transcendence.
Everyone appeals.
Everyone leans.
And the deeper truth is this:
There is no “view from nowhere.”
There is only the posture that believes it doesn't need one.
You call that clarity.
But I call it recursion denial.