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Re:Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI... by pfannkuchen on Friday May 22, 2026 @02:38PM (#48239694)
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.

Re:Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI... by phainopepla2 on Friday May 22, 2026 @02:43PM (#48239751)
> 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.

Re:Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI... by pickleRick243 on Friday May 22, 2026 @08:56PM (#48243437)
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.

Re:Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI... by andrepd on Saturday May 23, 2026 @07:13PM (#48252537)
> 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.