he Baha'i Faith. Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism are 'isms' only because the British chose to identify them as such.
Wonderful. And Pure Land Buddhists have Amitabha.
In some ways I would agree with you, but only in the sense that Islam and Buddhism etc. aren't religions either. The
concept of religion, rather than being a universally valid category as is generally supposed, is a peculiarly
European construct of surprisingly recent origin. W.Cantwell Smith, who unlike your Fowler, actually knows something about other religions, argues that none of the supposed founders of the world's major religions had any such intention. Smith, whose specialty is Islam, argues that "
Muhammad would have been, above all others perhaps, profoundly alarmed at any suggestion that he was starting a new religion. Smith points out that the
Arabic language does not even have a word for religion, strictly speaking: he details how the word
din, customarily translated as such, differs in significant important respects from the European concept." Smith suggests "that practitioners of any given faith do not historically come to regard what they do as
religion until they have developed a degree of cultural self-regard, causing them to see their collective spiritual practices and beliefs as in some way significantly
different from the
other. Religion in the contemporary sense of the word is for Smith the product of both
identity politics and
apologetics."
In other precisely the kind of identity politics and apologetics you are engaged in when you argue Christianity is
not a religion because originally the Latin word religio inferred a relationship between God and man, and has only recently been used to refer to a system of observances and beliefs.
You realize that doctrines, creeds and belief systems are all synonyms? I have a PhD field in church history and ever creed I've ever seen focused on the Person of Jesus Christ. It seems to be the one thing all Christians share in common.
