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From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Response to Laura - what is a religion? (off the topic)
Message-ID: <5267@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 17-Mar-85 15:30:40 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5267
Posted: Sun Mar 17 15:30:40 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 17-Mar-85 15:30:40 EST
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Okay Rich, we have a problem. Do you know why people think that tomatoes
are vegetables? I know an apocryphal story, and i can't vouch for its
correctness, but it seems that the Food and Drug Administration
classified them this way to make it easier for the farmers who
raised vegetables and tomatoes. So we have overloaded a word, and in
a funny sense -- one meaning of vegetable is the same as the other
meaning of vegetable with the addition of the tomato.

Now, look around. See how many people have a problem with this definition.
The only people I know who are seriously upset by it are those who are
objecting to Ronald Reagan calling ketchup a vegetable. Are there any
others that I have missed?

I suspect that having tomatoes reclassified by the FDA will not fix
Ronald Reagan in such a way that everybody will go home happy to
sleep tonight. I think that the whole thing doesn't matter very
much. If you want to fight the FDA I can tell you about a lot of
other things that they are doing which could use more fighting than
the definition of tomato, but I suspect that fighting the FDA is not
what you really want to do.

Now it is interesting that the botanists and farmers and gardeners
who use tomatoes in their work might conceivably want the definition of
tomato as a vegetable scrapped. I don't see them doing this, but one
could see why they are interested. Now, is it the religious writers,
religion professors, clergy, and gurus that object to people classifying
Hinduism and Buddhism as a religion? On the whole, no -- there are some
zealots who object to anything other than their religion being called religion,
but I think that we can excuse them. Is this because they think that Buddhists
worship a deity? Nope -- they argue like crazy over whether yoga is a form
of prayer, so I think they are rather aware of the distinction.

It is interesting, in that they want to distinguish between religions which
worship an external deity and those which do not. This is the ``eastern
religion'' ``western religion'' split. They *aren't* campaigning for
anotehr word that describes both western and eastern religion -- they
think that ``religion'' does quite well. Considering the effort that
they put into defining ``what is a cult'' I am sure that if they were
unhappy with the definition I would have heard about it by now.

Why are you unhappy with the word, Rich? I keep going back to the same
thing -- Rich is unhappy about what the word ``religion'' means because 
he is very attached to his definition of the word religion. He presumes
this definition of the word religion when he used the term, and it is
WISHFUL THINKING on his part that the rest of the world is going to
accept his definition.

So Rich, why is your attatchment to your definition of the word religion
(the one you find in your dictionary) any better than a Christian's
definition of the word God (the one he finds in his Bible)?

Laura Creighton

ps I think that we spell Ken Arndt's name wrong because the ending
   ``dn't'' is common in English. Also, I have no idea how to
   pronounce that name -- in my head it is a homonym for ``aren't''.