It's a strange christian sect that is generally atheistic but borrows values from the western tradition.

That's nothing to do with religion. It's just having values. You can have values without religion.

> it just means that it’s our religion to do them.

No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".

This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?

People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.

People who don’t believe it are bad.

If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.

People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.

People think we should spread it to other people.

Functionally, how is that different from religion?

Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.

> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.

I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.

And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.

It's a good word to use because it has so much in common with western religious traditions.

This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html

You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.

> People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.

In human rights or democratic rule of law?? What a preposterous notion. Precisely what separates religious belief from non-religious is the fact that the latter is dogmatic while the latter is not.

> If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science.

I'm always blown away by people who need religion to tell right from wrong.

Care to elaborate?

Then you define religion as information about a god. Other people define religion as metaphysical beliefs. Other people just define it as irrational staunch beliefs.

Like "don't use goto". That's religion.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

Religion and values are two different things. Human rights, universal equality, democracy are values, not religion.

They are also result of constant wars, genocide and general destruction. And Europe mainland was war free better place to live when we seek to sort of have those things. They dont even need to be perfect for making life better.

The fact that a government that isn't derived from the will of the people is unstable and likely to be overthrown can be logically and empirically observed, but we can and should test different forms of democracy by experimentation and observation. We can and should test which rights should take precedence over others. Holding the particular rights encoded in the Bill of Rights as sacred is a fallacy rooted in the deification of America's founders. Ultimately, individuals are interested in their own survival and should rationally build societal structures that serve that goal.

The foundation of human rights, universal equality, & democracy is empathy, which is basically a peer-reviewed scientific theory at a personal level that those with similar capabilities to you deserve equal respect ...or else, violence.

How did you miss out on learning this life lesson as a child?