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Why would that happen? Just because the two fields have certain things in common doesn't mean they're indistinguishable.

• bokonist 18y ago
  Actually, the two are much closer than you think. All major religions achieved their growth and status by becoming the ideological arm of state power. Both politics and religion are fundamentally about how people think about the rulers.
  • kaens 18y ago
    Organized religion, certainly. However, there is a lot of conflation of Religion and religion (or faith). I don't disagree with your point, it just deals with very semantically messy stuff.
  • gjm11 18y ago
    "All major religions achieved their growth and status by becoming the ideological arm of state power." I wonder whether that's true. Because it seems hard to distinguish from this: "All major religions, because of their growth and status, acquired state power which fuelled their further growth." To distinguish between the two, we'd want to look for religions that (presumably by good luck) got significant state power before they became widespread. Someone who knows more history than me may have more clue here, but the only example I can think of is that of the pharaoh Ankh-en-aten (= Akhnaten), who basically tried to introduce monotheism into ancient Egypt, with scarcely any success after the end of his reign. That's hardly conclusive, but it seems like evidence for the hypothesis that widespread belief matters more than state power in getting a religion off the ground.