That’s interesting. I’m not speaking of a subjective experience or ontological belief.

As far as “Western” and “academic,” “religio has been applied to Christianity and Islam for close to 1700 years, and to Judaism for at least 500. It was the common folk who got involved in the Crusades and Inquisition (my ancestors converted to Catholicism in Spain some 600+ years ago in order to survive)

When I was going weekly to Barnes and Noble in Greenville, SC over some 8 years to talk with Bob Jones University students (in a decidedly non academic way) to help me understand why they were looking forward to me and just about everyone on the planet to roast in Hades after Jesus returns, they were very much seeing the whole conversation in relation to their having the “best” religion of all.

I have no idea how you got the idea I personally apply this concept to anything outside the West. My point was the exact opposite.

Rather than ontological beliefs and sentiments, which is what so much of popular Western religions are about, so many Asians I’ve met and gotten to know deeply just intuitively “get” that what Krishna and the Buddha and Jesus and other founders taught was a way of being, not thinking or feeling. To call that “religion” and even relate it to so many whose thinking on religion is either like the Bob Jones types or the rather humanistic, ultimately nihilistic liberal type, seems to be trying to put together things that are so radically different the words no longer have any meaning.

It’s kind of like most conversations about teh “Right” or the “Left.” They’re not having anything remotely to do with what those words have referred to for centuries.