Religion is often used as an analogy to disparage some other phenomenon. Surprisingly perhaps, this is done by both religious and non-religious people. I guess

Religion is often used as an analogy to disparage some other phenomenon. Surprisingly perhaps, this is done by both religious and non-religious people. I guess for the non-religious people religion is in general mistrusted, while for religious people it is bad to treat anything beside "true" religion as a religion. So "being like a religion" is generally a bad thing regardless of who uses the phrase. But using an analogy require you understand the phenomenon you are comparing it to. So what does religion mean? In this article, religion is about - "a transcendental realm" (and so is youtube) - meeting in congregations (and so is Google meetup) - a hierarchy with devoted spiritual advisors at the top (and so is, apparently Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg) But without even going into what the nature of religion is, it is easy to dispel this analogy. Because even in a highly religious society you can have non-religious organizations, meetups and "transcendental realms" in the form of fiction, music, art etc. So there is clearly a difference. Unless you are going to argue that everything is religion - which you can, of course, given a vague enough definition, but which also makes the term meaningless. If everything is religion then nothing is religion.