And if Soupism is not a religion, what is it?

Careful, I hear religions based on the concept of soup-remacy aren't popular these days.

No, I don’t think you could call soupism a religion. In my own thinking, I’m not sure I ever identified the word “supernatural” as the unknown thing that takes something from a lifestyle or ideology to a religion, but I think you might be on to something. To me, what’s important is that a religion tacitly acknowledges the big universal questions of life (What am I doing here? How should I live my life? What happens after I die?) by giving mostly unquestionable answers to their followers. I wouldn’t call soupists, or even vegans, a group with much stricter rules, distinct moral beliefs, and culture a religion for that reason.

>>1431
your point about vegans is good

>>1431
s/supernatural/soupernatural

Kidding aside, you raise a good point. But the distinction gets a bit blurred with cults, which may also provide "answers" to some of those questions you cited.

>>1435
I think cults are a subset of religion, or maybe the larval stage of religion. Lots of popular religions started with a cult of personality.

If it has no supernatural elements then it's a philosophy not a region.

>>1450
This post reminds me of Wittgenstein's point about how the majority of philosophical debates are really just bickering over the definitions of words.

Sure, Soupism could be a religion, but if so then it's a very unsatisfying and boring one.

>>1460
What, you don't like soup?

>>1460
It's not just arguing semantics in this case.

To be a religion it has to have a supernatural element connected to it that explains it's rules. So for example, if there was a soup god that said you must eat soup once a day or you will die, that's a religion. But if it's just a group of people that decided that eating soup once a day is good for you or that eating soup once a day with like-minded people brings people together and is good to create lasting friendships, that's not a religion it's a philosophy or even a health choice.

Post edited on 18th Feb 2022, 6:09pm

>>1462
>if it's just a group of people that decided that eating soup once a day is good for you or that eating soup once a day with like-minded people brings people together and is good to create lasting friendships
Sounds pretty casual. What if you add fanaticism?

>>1460
>philosophical debates are really just bickering over the definitions of words
The bickering over "consciousness" always seems like this. People always redefine the term so they can defend a viewpoint that no one really meant in the first place. The "compatibilists" are a prime example of this.

At it's core there are only 3 options for the question of free will:

* The universe is completely deterministic (á la superdeterminism) at which point you obviously have no free will at all, and the notion of science itself which depends on the notion of independence faces a radical paradigm shift (maybe independence only holds at the macroscopic level or something, who knows). That is to say, the future is "predetermined" but not predictable given the complexity. Either way this is the option that no one dares to accept.

* The universe has true randomness at the quantum level, and our decisions/thoughts at any point in time are purely a function of our sensory inputs and brain patterns which evolve over time (plus maybe some minor random noise). In this case the future is "locally" predetermined (depending on the amount of random noise), and in the long term is undetermined (given the randomness). But if there's no mechanism by which you can influence the randomness, then there's no "will" here either.

* There is some unknown physics by which we can influence events at a non-material level. This is seemingly what most people cling to when confronted with the question.

But either way philosophy contributes nothing here. If this _is_ a decidable question it is one that can only solved by experimentation to learn more about the nature of the universe and how our sensory inputs are converted into thoughts.

>>1463
It would not change anything, many non-religious movements are quite fanatic, for example communism, anarchism or fascism.

I think this is approaching the problem fundamentally backwards.

For context: first, if you were to simply declare that Soupism is a religion, on what grounds could that be refuted? We have no objectively true and correct English dictionary as penned by an almighty god himself. And we have no objective truth machine into which we can feed non-empirical questions and receive irrefutable results. And citing an authority would simply be pushing the problem off onto someone else. Webster's, for instance, also has no magic truth machine.

Second, how is anything determined? If you start with assumptions you can make logical inferences from those assumptions. e.g. "If we assume A and B, then we can deduce that C must also be true". But because that starts from assumptions, any conclusions derived this way are hypothetical. And I don't think you were asking for a hypothetical. If you had intended to start your question with: "If we assume that religion means _", then you wouldn't have needed to ask at all. Else, because the only way for outside information to get into your brain is through your senses, the only other means of determining anything is through observation. And starting from observation, the experience of whatever it is would have to come first, and then the term applied to it would simply be a reference to that experience. You couldn't, for instance, have the concept of soup before you had the experience of it (real or imagined).

Getting to the point: so to define what a term means from observation, you would have to designate a particular experience as the archetype of that thing, and the characteristics of that chosen archetype define what the term means. For instance, you're eating your bowl of wet food, you decide "this is soup", and then whatever else is or isn't soup is defined by whether it is sufficiently similar to The Soup. It could also be a cluster of archetypes, a group of things by which their collective or common features define the term. You could have subtypes of the thing ("tomato soups") or partial fits (cereal as a "demi-soup"), certain features might be weighed more heavily than others, and specific definitions may vary with individuals or with groups or with time.

So, rather than asking "is Soupism a religion?", I think it makes a lot more sense to ask "is it useful to categorize Soupism as a religion?". But following the intent of the question to investigate what a "religion" is, and whether a supernatural element is required, we should be asking:
What are the archetypal religions?
What are their critical features?
Is a supernatural component one of those features?

But since those opinions will vary, there's not going to be a clear objective answer. Personally, I consider the most critical feature by far to be believers who enforce belief in a doctrine, harassing those who believe or say the wrong things or some such. That's a very wide net, there are lots of things in that net which do not have supernatural elements, but Soupism is not one of them. As to what else it might be, a hobby perhaps? I'm not sure.