Religion – at least in the UK – does not now require the worshipping of gods. Scientology, says Britain’s Supreme Court, is now officially a religion.
(The Australian Government is ahead of the game on this: it recognises Scientology as a legitimate religion, at least to the extent that the Church of Scientology gets the same exemptions from paying tax as other religious groups.)
Although I am Atheist, I nevertheless have dozens of ‘gods’: Truth, Justice, Freedom, Love, Humanity, Nature, etc. Each of my ‘gods’ has one or more ‘religions’. For example, my ‘god’ Truth has science and philosophy as its ‘religions’. The inverted commas indicate that I am using these words in a non-theistic and naturalistic (non-supernaturalist) sense.
I have been making an attempt to think through the ways in which humanity has used the concepts of religion, spirituality, God and the gods. The problem, it seems to me, is that we tend to conflate religion with the supernatural. Such an amalgamation is normal within our everyday language. The two words have almost become synonymous. This, in my opinion, is a serious problem. It causes confusion in our understanding of what the gods, religion and spirituality really are.