Now that we (sorta) know what a god is, what qualifies as religion? If almost anything can be a god... can anything be a religion?!
In this episode, we discuss what religion is. Does there need to be a God to worship? Well, it’s a tricky thing to explain. There are many religions like Buddhism and Confucianism that, while they have one founder, aren’t directly worshiped like we see in the Abrahamic religions.
The foundation of the word religion (ligaments) means to be connected to something. We go over a couple of accepted definitions for religion, break them down into their parts and identify their flaws.
Is it a unified system of belief? Often there are differences within the same group. Or is religion a metaphysical moral vision?
With groups looking for tax-exempt status from the CRA and the IRS, we discuss how important it is for people to be aware of what actually counts as a religion.
And finally, is Katie actually religious? With these definitions, you might be surprised!
A good sequel to this episode is #16 Abide with Me, where we talk about parody religions.
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Katie Dooley 00:11
Welcome back to the latest and greatest episode of The Holy watermelon Podcast. I'm Katie.
Preston Meyer 00:16
And I'm Preston.
Katie Dooley 00:17
And today we are having another big roundabout episode on what is religion? Do
Preston Meyer 00:24
you have an answer for that question? I don't you want to make a stab at it?
Katie Dooley 00:30
Yes, it is a belief system, a commonly shared belief system by a group of people that worship of God, please see episode two, what is a God to know how good that definition was?
Preston Meyer 00:52
Does it have to have a God? It could have multiple gods but a minimum of one.
Katie Dooley 00:57
I would say yes. But again, we know how big a god is. So we can have the church of mom and dad.
Preston Meyer 01:03
What about Buddhism?
Katie Dooley 01:06
Do they not worship the Buddha?
Preston Meyer 01:08
So that's the trick is, though Tallis Buddhism, specifically believe in a pretty cool cosmology. But there's multiple statements from Dalai Lama and whoever else that any theological study is a distraction and a waste of time, because there is no god for Buddhism
Katie Dooley 01:34
and philosophies of the person, right.
Preston Meyer 01:36
And the Buddha, of course, is a figure who is revered but not a Judeo Christian defined God, even though according to some of the definitions we came up with last time, it's not unfair to call him a god.
Katie Dooley 01:55
So we're off to a great start. Right?
Preston Meyer 01:57
All right, yeah. Not only is God tricky, but religion is tricky. And we're gonna dive into that a little bit, I
Katie Dooley 02:05
think we're gonna have another round about a PSA that will hopefully clarify more than confused.
Preston Meyer 02:13
If nothing else, you'll have something to discuss with your friends. And that's all we want at the end of this, isn't it? So there are competing schools of thoughts, of course, like in literally any other subject worth discussing. So question is, how do you define religion? I want to read to you a couple of definitions that I've got here from some well respected scholars. First is Emile Durkheim. So he defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices, relative to sacred things, which is super broad, but also closes things in reasonably well, I think I
Katie Dooley 02:56
feel like the word sacred is actually a problematic word in that sentence, because then we get into what does sacred mean, the definition of sacred, just like we had the definition of worship and definition of a god. I think everyone probably hold something different, sacred. I also don't like the word sacred. And maybe this is a tangent. But I think is now's a good time to dive into that. I don't like the word sacred, in general, because it means it can't be questioned. I think that's why religion today has so many problems is because you can't talk or question things that are sacred. And, yeah, it breeds a lot of problems in with power and corruption. Because you can't question your church or your priests because it's a sacred institution. And we probably should be questioning justice. Thanks.
Preston Meyer 03:55
Always question authority.
Katie Dooley 03:59
So dismantle the patriarchy.
Preston Meyer 04:03
There are different definitions of sacred even most people that I've talked to say that sacred is completely synonymous with holy. They're probably people that I haven't talked to who are happy to say, no, no, no, those are two very different things,
Katie Dooley 04:19
I would actually fall into that category. Okay.
Preston Meyer 04:22
How would you describe holy,
Katie Dooley 04:26
I would add the magical element to Holy, okay. Whereas, I can see and almost agree with, you know, that marriage to an extent is sacred, right. I'm all for divorce. And, you know, in some ways, I think it's pure, but I can see why someone call marriage sacred. But I don't think that totally in any way, shape or form. Because you can have marriages very separate from church. Your look like
Preston Meyer 04:59
you I'm listening and I have ideas. Okay, I'm letting you go.
Katie Dooley 05:04
Yeah, I really feel like holy has that magical mystical as the words and religious size mystical element to it that it's like a squares or rectangles or a rectangle isn't a square. That's how I feel holy things are sacred, but also because holy can help you much more than that. It's okay.
Preston Meyer 05:28
Yeah, so sacred is kind of tricky. In most contexts, it is things that like, don't don't approach that thing. In the Old Testament, and, by natural continuation of things, the New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures have the word sacred or holy. In most translations, they seem to be used pretty interchangeably. But it's a thing that's set apart, set aside, the Levites, were always a sacred group, not because they shouldn't ever be questioned, but because they were set aside and separated from the rest of Israel. All the rest of Israel got this cool inheritance of the land is Levites got a handful of cities and altars to offer sacrifice on so they were made separate. Then you got the NAZA rights, who, like myself, I'm gonna make a little statement right here, that sounds super terrible. But I am even more holy. Because I set myself apart slightly further by being an azurite. Doesn't mean I'm above questioning or anything else like that. I'm just a little different, until I can slough off this mantle of being an azurite, which is coming up soon. Oh, yes, the holier than thou. Right? It's a phrase that came out this just the other day. And when most people say, you know that this person has a holier than thou attitude, or somebody says, I'm holy back off, that's usually holy is the wrong word. Usually, that's with the sense of self righteousness, I'm so much better than you because I do this thing that you aren't doing, or I'm not doing these things that you do, which is just a terrible way to operate running through life, you alienate pretty much everybody, which is never good.
Katie Dooley 07:22
No, it's not.
Preston Meyer 07:24
There's a huge difference between righteousness and holiness. And I
Katie Dooley 07:29
don't think a truly holy person would ever describe themselves as holy.
Preston Meyer 07:35
I can't agree completely.
Katie Dooley 07:37
It's one of those. I'm trying to think of a real world example of like, the nicest, kindest people would never acknowledge how nice and tight or generous people, right BOSU. Now
Preston Meyer 07:51
you're talking about humility, I guess, which is safer to connect to righteousness than necessarily to holiness. Holiness and sacredness is definitely about being separated from what is not in that same category. literally anybody and everybody should be interested in being humble to some degree. Some people may be a little too humble for their own good. Some people definitely need to be humbled, maybe have that thrust upon them for Sibley. Righteousness is very different from that righteousness, in the biblical sense, is a matter of being a just person. And everybody should seek after being just, and it's super easy to see when somebody is terribly unjust. And that's also getting tricky to police properly, I guess, but also forcing somebody to meet any criteria of righteousness, that don't demanding somebody meet your standards of righteousness? If they're not already committed to that is obscene. Yes,
Katie Dooley 09:13
and this is probably an episode for another day. We're talking about righteousness and standards of righteousness. This literally comes down to how you interpret your holy text. And there's everyone interprets differently. It doesn't matter if you're the same denomination. It's a mess people.
Preston Meyer 09:32
I mean, even the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, the law that's given, some of it is written as received from God as divine law. And then a huge swath of the content is stuff that was added later on a case by case basis of oh, we need to codify this. And the stuff that we have in the Torah that is in the Written Torah, but now Not the Oral Torah is just the stuff that was codified earlier before they said, Yeah, we're not going to add to this anymore.
Katie Dooley 10:08
All right, so that was a big wormhole. Yeah, give us another definition. So
Preston Meyer 10:14
we looked at Durham's definition of religion and then took a hard left her into secret. So unified system of belief is what Durkheim said. And I mean, if you look within any religious group, there's usually varying opinions, unless your group is way too small. And even then you got somebody who's gotten a varying opinion, who just isn't saying something a little different from that is max Stackhouse, he defined religion as a comprehensive worldview or metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself, basically true. And just even if all dimensions of it cannot either be fully confirmed or refuted. So basically, even though I kind of like it, it is way too broad.
Katie Dooley 11:05
It is very wordy, but there are definitely parts of it that I really like. Should we break
Preston Meyer 11:12
that down a little bit and examine the parts of it. So comprehensive worldview?
Katie Dooley 11:17
I like that.
Preston Meyer 11:20
So far, incredibly broad. If you want to run through your life with thinking nothing about anything big and just considering how dogs are pretty cool, and objectively better than cats, and there are people who hold this opinion. That's that's a worldview that may be completely comprehensive if you decide that nothing else is worth thinking about. Next is a metaphysical moral vision.
Katie Dooley 11:54
I like the metaphysical. And why? Because? Because I think the world's most popular religions have that metaphysical aspect. Obviously, we're gonna come across ones that don't. But I think that encompasses the Judeo Christian God without, you know, offending them. And, you know, all the way to the breadth of into Gods and Goddesses. Yeah, metaphysical, and it, you know, it encompasses some bad ones, too. I'm thinking it was Scientology that compasses that as well. Because yeah, every metaphysical is a broad term, it's, you know, I like it.
Preston Meyer 12:47
So I've said before, I believe you to be a religious person, and every time you laugh, and think that that's nonsense, but I know that you have a metaphysical moral vision. Do you believe in love?
Katie Dooley 13:02
Yeah.
Preston Meyer 13:05
And that to a degree, one, one degree or another, that love should more or less be spread out to more than your immediate community of the four people in his house or your family or your next door neighbor's? That's a metaphysical moral vision, where we get into humanism, which is according to stack house, or at least my interpretation of this definition, Stackhouse offers a religious position
Katie Dooley 13:38
well, let's let's keep going. Yeah, hearing I'm hearing him talking Off mic brands like, let's keep going. And I think he narrows it down a bit more though. Yes,
Preston Meyer 13:49
he does. There's there's definitely more so this metaphysical moral vision must be accepted as binding. If somebody says Love isn't important, you can treat your neighbors like dirt. Would you feel that that person has breached a moral contract or a social contract?
Katie Dooley 14:09
I mean, I think they were in Dec but I
Preston Meyer 14:13
don't think that's different from what I just said I get hurt from I like your words better and I use them often Off mic.
Katie Dooley 14:21
But I don't have a contract with these people.
Preston Meyer 14:25
Not a written contract but
Katie Dooley 14:28
yeah, I was like It's not like I kicked them out my house but I probably would if your back so Okay, carry on. All right.
Preston Meyer 14:38
So metaphysical moral vision that is accepted as binding, because it is held to be in itself basically true or unjust. So the basically to makes me giggle. Just true at its deepest level of in this example, loving your neighbors and your community.
Katie Dooley 15:01
is like I read that as like, basically true because we can't prove otherwise,
Preston Meyer 15:06
which is definitely the way he finished that with cannot either be fully confirmed or refuted. But
Katie Dooley 15:13
which follows on like in my brain, it's like red flag, red flag because you can create anything based off that. And I mean, we'll get more into how, you know things like tax exemption, anything can be tax exempt with these definitions. Yes. It's
Preston Meyer 15:38
as much as you see people in the scholarly world have a hard time to find religion. Legislators straight up avoid it most of the time. Well
Katie Dooley 15:47
imagine, I obviously they would be specialists in the area, but the IRS and the CRA. Like they're not religious scholars, they're just trying to do their job. And like said, yes, they would be specialized in the area of religious organizations. But at some point, they must just shake their head and go fine.
Preston Meyer 16:06
Stamp 711 not a church move.
Katie Dooley 16:10
I mean, I mean, 711 every Sunday morning, sure. To get gas
Preston Meyer 16:15
to seven women sell gas, the
Katie Dooley 16:18
one by replace, that's okay. That's nice.
Preston Meyer 16:22
It seems like more and more similar ones are moving away to just being a convenience store. But that's, I'm moving away from the topic of discussion. So, in between those two examples we have of Durkheim and Stackhouse, we have a wide variety of different interpretations on what qualifies as a religion based on however you wanted to find it. The idea of having a god as you had said before, Confucianism is something that doesn't fit into that at all. Confucius barely qualifies as a God according to the definitions we came up with before. He still kind of does. Like the Buddha, but twist, slightly less divine position, but still is he's revered as a God as a great teacher. And as many great teachers were deified, but it's, it's super complicated. If you want to have a broad definition of religion, you're gonna start including things you didn't want to include in your list of gods. Wayne Gretzky or Eric Clapton. These people are Mee Mee Mee Mee Mee Mee these people are revered as gods by an awful lot of people Michael Jackson,
Katie Dooley 17:49
King of Pop, he even has the the monarchy on it.
Preston Meyer 17:55
There's there's all kinds of people who have huge followings have the great big gatherings that churches or the government like to see in churches and whatnot.
Katie Dooley 18:06
And on regular basis. Yeah,
Preston Meyer 18:09
there's definitely rules and standards that fan clubs will expect people to meet. I brought a huge paper on this very subject a little less than a year ago. And there's, there's so much that has a religious following around these people that are basically heroes that become deified because of our worship of them. And they look like religions, when you see the way people behave, just the way you have a priest throw on his robe and his scarf, every mass, you'll have all these hockey fans throw on their jerseys on their face paint and all these very similar things. And so they can go and perform their rituals. That looks awfully religious, but it doesn't fit into what we want religion to be defined as.
Katie Dooley 19:14
Do you think if these Eric Clapton like push for it, he could get tax exempt status?
Preston Meyer 19:22
I really doubt it. And
Katie Dooley 19:26
which we're gonna do an episode on.
Preston Meyer 19:29
Depends on how he goes about it, I suppose. Like if he says, I'm starting the church of Eric Clapton, the guitar God, then that's all there is to it. And somebody has given tax exempt status. I mean, you just keep applying to applying in different jurisdictions, and somebody's going to grant it. And so with all these different religions are all kinds of different acts of worship like we're dressing a certain way, reading certain texts, texts, color Think baseball cards is not wildly different from collecting different religious books. In the actual act of collection, what you do with them is also not terribly different. For an awful lot of people, they'll collect their baseball cards and never read them with a lot of people in their Bibles, while others are way into the stats that they can find on their baseball cards, and they studied them and try and figure things out. There are people who have made games around baseball cards, which sounds kind of cool, from my perspective as a game designer, as well. And you've got people who are way into their scriptures that want to learn every little detail. And there's everything in between. And that's a sort of religious worship, in both cases, with the baseball cards and with the holy books. So what is religious? Anything? But there's more to it. Often enough, you'll have people who are spiritual but not religious is a super common phrase. Yes. You'll hear that a lot in interviews of celebrities in Hollywood, that if you ask them about their spirituality be like, Yeah, I'm spiritual but not religious. There's, I got Ron Perlman coming to mind, I can't think of why. But you must have been cited it in one of my classes. But what does that phrase even me?
Katie Dooley 21:40
I mean, it's funny, especially when we started talking about me, because arguably, I'm spiritual, but not religious. But I wouldn't even consider myself that. So. Everyone is spiritual, but not religious, especially with these definitions we have of religion, I think the most common if you ask someone who said that what they're all right. That the verb they want to give it a pause for, right? If you ask someone, what their definition was, I think spiritual presidents who blame God but not in organized religion?
Preston Meyer 22:21
I think that's pretty standard. I think I agree with you that most people would make that distinction when they've used that phrase, which
Katie Dooley 22:27
just blows this whole thing up and are they tax exempt? Can you be individually tax exempt for being spiritual, not religious?
Preston Meyer 22:38
See, the New Testament, there's, Oh, I feel bad that I I don't want to misquote it. I need to get my bad. I got my phone. Oh, it says in the New Testament, your body is a temple. If your body is a temple, it's not wildly different from a church, you should be tax exempt.
Katie Dooley 23:01
care right now and be like that my body's a pimple,
Preston Meyer 23:05
right? I'm there for I should be tax exempt. So spiritual, and that spiritual, but not religious. Let's examine spiritual what does that mean?
Katie Dooley 23:18
I think that's even broader. Because
Preston Meyer 23:22
do you have to believe in a God to be spiritual? No,
Katie Dooley 23:25
I don't think so. And Katie's controversial in it would be this is like all we worry, I was what I would call it. So if you're spiritual, and you do right here, if you're spiritual, and you do sound therapy, or for spiritual and take a bunch of LSD and go to Shambhala, like that, I would categorize that all under spiritual, I would also categorize someone who's a Christian doesn't go to church, or belong to a particular denomination, because they have problems with whatever, whether it's tithing or controversies in the church, or just they don't want to get up and go. Every Sunday, I would also put them into categories spiritual. But yeah, I would put a lot of worry under spirituality as well, that I wouldn't. And these people would probably disagree. I wouldn't put that under religion. Like I wouldn't put Reiki or taro under religion, but I would absolutely put under spiritual and people who practice these things are probably shaking their fists. I mean, going it's my religion. Yeah.
Preston Meyer 24:41
Okay,
Katie Dooley 24:41
do you have any comments on my definition of groupings?
Preston Meyer 24:47
I like and it's it's not terribly different from one of the my notes like you kind of got it. There's the if you're spiritual, not religious, oftentimes because there's the whole have some sort of faith without being connected to a group worship at home or Reiki or Tarot or whatever, is usually a lot less group oriented, which when we talked about religion, religion, this nonsense word that appears to have left my mind.
Katie Dooley 25:18
Tire podcast is about Yeah,
Preston Meyer 25:21
we I think we talked before in previous episodes that religion usually is a thing that binds people together. Yeah. Yeah. And if your spiritual not religious, it's usually you feel that way because you're not part of a faith community. Not always the case. But definitely often enough that I feel comfortable saying usually without having done any proper surveys.
Katie Dooley 25:45
Definitely, I'd say kind of sound like my mother, it's definitely more loosey goosey. Yeah, I know women who participate in circles and some go all the time and some go some of the time and some of them try it once. Whereas if you're a good practitioner of Judeo Christian religion, you go every week, whatever your day happens to be. Some
Preston Meyer 26:07
Christians would go to Mass every day. Usually these are retirees but not exclusively. But
Katie Dooley 26:15
I'd say a good minimum of once a week whereas I mean Moon circles
Preston Meyer 26:22
every night know when
Katie Dooley 26:23
circles happen monthly and I said just from five never been to one maybe we should go to one Preston. I don't know if you're allowed to that's for for women. Oh, that's an excellent point. Identifying people. But my the feeling I've gotten I've seen women go is that some will drop in some wool, when when they need it kind of thing as opposed to make
Preston Meyer 26:46
sense. A lot of people are like that was church. Feel like I needed add on needed. I'd rather go golfing today, you got a full spectrum of group engagement, warm summer
Katie Dooley 26:58
day in Canada, you don't pass those up, right?
Preston Meyer 27:03
Another Lord will understand
Katie Dooley 27:05
that wasn't very Canadian. That was more Irish.
Preston Meyer 27:09
You also mentioned those people who believe in God while avoiding say, definitely faulty human authority. So spiritual, I actually read a great book by a Catholic priest, Ronald Brule. Heiser, I imagine some of the people listening might if you're into this kind of podcast, you've probably been made aware of him before. He's done a lot of writing. And his book called The Holy longing goes into very deeply what is spirituality in the pursuit of another goal, but the, the passionate pursuit of life is spirituality. According to him. Oh, interesting. Janis Joplin is an example he uses. Who you look Janis Joplin, you don't think oh, yeah, that's a that's a religious person. And some people based on their own definition of spirituality probably wouldn't even think she's spiritual, but real hazards like, No, this is a very spiritual. And I can disagree. His definition of being passionately engaged in celebrating life is a pretty good definition for me for spirituality. And he doesn't have it tied to any belief in immortality or anything like that. It's the passionate pursuit of celebrating life, which is pretty cool, but also very broad, very
Katie Dooley 28:47
broad. Because by that definition, I'm spiritual but not religious.
Preston Meyer 28:52
Right? Or maybe you are religious to?
Katie Dooley 28:57
Is this the ultimate goal for the podcast that I turn you into an atheist to determine a religious person?
Preston Meyer 29:02
Well see, I'm not even throwing theology. You're saying, but you are some sort of religious.
Katie Dooley 29:12
And where was I going with this? But I still wouldn't call myself that, but maybe we'll do an episode on the self identification. Sure, we can look into that. But yeah, that's a very everyone's spiritual but not religious definition.
Preston Meyer 29:30
Okay. So I've got you spiritual, according to roll Heiser, and I've got your religious according to Stackhouse. So, looking at what is religion? I personally think that the fundamental basics of the word, the etymology of it, bring us to being connected to something ligature, for example, connects things. That's a big part of the word religious, or religion. And so you can either be concerned about being connected to a god, or being connected to a community or being connected to one person, you got a lot of freedom there is being connected, you can be concerned about connecting the universe together just in understanding it, not in any sort of metaphysical way, but in a very physical way of just understanding the universe almost fits into religion. And we talked before about how science can be kind of religious. But then we're getting too into a field that opens up religion a little too broad.
Katie Dooley 30:49
How about this on the defensive point? Do you think these definitions need to be more specific? Do we need to narrow them down? I'm thinking quite specifically as for tax exemption, but even you know, we're talking about I'm a spiritual and religious atheist. You know, what do I put on my senses? Do people need to be more aware of these definitions? And I mean, by maybe another link, does it even matter?
Preston Meyer 31:24
At the CS degree question, if you're way into dogs, doesn't matter what a Maine Coon is. I mean, your focus is, wherever your focus is going to be, you don't need to know about big cats, if you just straight up bar, dog person,
Katie Dooley 31:39
dogs their life.
Preston Meyer 31:42
So the idea of finding an answer to this question has its purpose perplexed an awful lot of scholars, and an awful lot of them straight up, don't care enough to put the time into it. They'd rather look more at the manifest manifestations of spiritual behavior, how people congregate, rather than why they congregate maybe.
Katie Dooley 32:13
So it's really just a very specific area of sociology and anthropology. Absolutely. I know from your schooling, you've touched on things like sports is religion, and science is religion. So as you see, well, if you don't know what a religion is, how do you know it's study religious scholar, but you clearly have studied and all so
Preston Meyer 32:35
it's actually really, really complicated. Even though I mean, it shouldn't be. Like, if you say, that train of thought, it's gone, we can scrub this part of the eye, knowing what religion is like, somebody says, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever. You think, religion. That's a religion. And it's part of a lived experience, and you just have been around it, you by osmosis, you just have grown to categorize things this way, because you just keep observing it without knowing exactly what what's what, for example, your understanding of color, wildly different from my understanding of color. I know that there's between this wavelength and this wavelength, I can see different colors. I would count six different colors in the the various wavelengths. I know you see way more colors than that. Yeah, and some people would count fewer than six. Yeah. And the study of color is a fascinating thing that the when you see green versus blue, you have different words for them. Whereas in some parts of the world, I've been told that the there them together. Yeah, there are personal it's green through Blue is one color, orange and red. That's red. And there's yellow in the middle. And that's the deal. Purple usually isn't lumped in with blue, but I bet you there's somebody out there who does
Katie Dooley 34:20
some crazy person, send us an email, if that's you. Right.
Preston Meyer 34:25
I want to learn more about that too.
Katie Dooley 34:27
I want to learn more about your world. I'm really curious about the tax exemption question and the definition of religion because
Preston Meyer 34:37
what qualifies you for being tax exempt
Katie Dooley 34:39
and we are going to touch I don't want to get too too deep into this episode because we're going to actually talk about it next episode, but John Oliver talks about the IRS tax exemption in one of his episodes of Last Week Tonight. And he actually gets Last Week Tonight, tax exempt under their definition of religion and And that's fine for Last Week Tonight, because it was basically a big joke. And they donated all their money to I believe Doctors Without Borders that we have cases like, specifically I'm thinking the Church of Scientology has, I want to save billions of dollars of real estate holdings. And they're tax exempt, and they had to fight for tax exemption for a really long time. But I would argue that that's probably one that should have been caught.
Preston Meyer 35:35
But it's a religion, isn't it? Most of the people involved genuinely believe in the spiritual or metaphysical or whatever it is that's going on that is taught in that very militaristic group.
Katie Dooley 35:55
So, Katie, controversial opinion, I need the same time for this. What if churches just weren't tax exempt? That I honestly think would be that
Preston Meyer 36:10
it would simplify things a lot?
Katie Dooley 36:13
Because, I mean, I don't pay tax in the States. But obviously, there is churches Scientology here in Canada, to Catholic Church has a ton of money. And as a taxpayer, yeah, that kind of sucks. So they are tax free. And it could be contributed a lot to I mean, people in other ways that aren't their parishioners. I know one of the big sticking points for the Church of Scientology is with other churches, you have to prove that the money that you save in taxes going back to your parishioners to help them in some way. And from my understanding, there's no proof in the Church of Scientology, that their money that they save is going back to their parishioners, especially because those people pay for all of their courses.
Preston Meyer 37:05
So that devil's advocate on that specific detail. No, I'd love to, I don't want anybody to confuse me with a defender of Scientology. But I, from what I understand, an awful lot of Scientologists get to live on property owned by the Church of Scientology, which might just be enough for the government to say yes, they're benefiting.
Katie Dooley 37:29
I've heard the empty. So maybe that's what nobody actually lives.
Preston Meyer 37:37
That could be true. I am standing here as a person who knows not nearly enough about Scientology's mechanical working is to discuss them properly.
Katie Dooley 37:47
Mike Rinder if you're listening, we'd love to interview because he would be able to answer that question. Yes, as an atheist, that is my solution. No tax exemption for churches.
Preston Meyer 38:03
It seems simple enough to accomplish it would make an awful lot of people more comfortable with what's going on, especially since there's an awful lot of abuse in church systems. Well,
Katie Dooley 38:17
and that's that's sort of my point in getting this definition more specific is how do we avoid people just becoming churches for tax exemption? And again, we're gonna talk about this next episode, in addition to the John Oliver, when there was a fantastic Bob's Burgers episode, where they do just that to save an aquarium, they may think, obviously, Bob's Burgers is fiction. Spoilers. So they wrote that storyline where it's John Oliver did it in real life. They made the aquarium at church to save it from being shut down. So how do you how is this Can we get tax exemption for the Holy watermelon podcast? Because we meet here, bi weekly. And Taylor growing our congregations growing and you join us every two weeks, and we worship the sound God Bryant, like that. I mean, part of me wants to try hard. He doesn't want to fight this era. But any final thoughts? I love to pause if it's not a final class, you can cut out for it final.
Preston Meyer 39:34
What else haven't we covered?
Katie Dooley 39:35
I mean, we got to tie this on a nice bow even though we really didn't answer the question because we knew this was another big broad episode on what is religion
Preston Meyer 39:45
is super complicated. Just like what is it can be super broad or super narrow. If you narrow it in too much. You're gonna be cutting people out. If you say it has to have a God. Then you've cut out most Buddhists and all kinds humanists unless of course, you go with a far too broad definition of God. It's super complicated. I enjoy talking about it. And you should definitely talk to your friends about it.
Katie Dooley 40:15
If you Yes, you have any questions, you should shoot us an email at Holy watermelon@gmail.com. And we'd love to hear any episode ideas or talking points you'd like us to address.
Preston Meyer 40:30
Send us your questions, comments, complaints. If you have hate mail for us, we'll read it will read it for sure. I think it'll be fun.
Katie Dooley 40:39
I think we'll do fall hate mail episodes because we're talking about religion and people don't like to talk about this thing, right.
Preston Meyer 40:49
And so that's it for this week. Peace be with you.
Katie Dooley 40:54
Settle down. That's all for this week. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review and five stars. And until next time, peace
Preston Meyer 41:04
be with you.
