Augustus
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It's not fear to define, but the observation that we can't define in a manner that demarcates religions from secular belief systems.
It's also not about "prejudice" but creating a category that confuses more than it enlightens. We can use the term as a shorthand for convenience, but if we are trying to identify a trans-cultural category in which we have "religious" and "secular" spheres that can be demarcated then it fails and ends up misleading.
Sorry for the long quote, but it's quicker than typing what I would say:
“It is a mistake to treat religion as a constant in human culture across time and space. None of the thinkers we examined in chapter 1 would deny that religion has taken a kaleidoscopic variety of forms across the centuries of human history. But each of the theories we examined in the first chapter is about religion as such. This indicates a distinction between essence and form; religion is religion in any era and any place, though it may take different outward forms..
A history of the term religion makes this assumption deeply problematic. Ancient languages have no word that approximates what modern English speakers mean by religion; Wilfred Cantwell Smith cites the scholarly consensus that neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians had any equivalent term for religion, and he adds that a similar negative conclusion is found for the Aztecs and the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Japan.9
The word is derived from the ancient Latin word religio, but religio was only one of a constellation of terms surrounding social obligations in ancient Rome, and when used it signified something quite different from religion in the modern sense.
Religio referred to a powerful requirement to perform some action. Its most probable derivation is from re-ligare, to rebind or relink, that is, to reestablish a bond that has been severed. To say religio mihi est—that something is “religio for me”—meant that it was something that carried a serious obligation for a person. This included not only cultic observances—which were themselves sometimes referred to as religiones, such that there was a different religio or set of observances at each shrine—
but also civic oaths and family rituals, things that modern Westerners normally consider to be secular.10
When religio did refer to temple sacrifices, it was possible—and common among certain intellectuals—in ancient Rome to practice religio, but not believe in the existence of gods...
Religio was largely indifferent to theological doctrine and was primarily about the customs and traditions that provided the glue for the Roman social order..
Religio was a relatively minor concept for the early Christians, in part because it does not correspond to any single concept that the biblical writers considered significant.”
The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict - William Cavanaugh
Yet these people themselves had no word that equates to religion. Don't you see that as problematic?
When outsiders try to define another's culture in terms of their own, then you get distortions and misunderstandings.
See you are defining it in terms of beliefs held true by faith (as per the Protestant Christianity that shapes the worldview of the Anglophone world).
Yes, they evolve in the culture they are used in based on a whole range of cultural assumptions.
It would be a mistake to assume these are universal (a common mistake of Western thought that is another legacy of monotheism).
I'll reply to the stuff about myth tomorrow (hopefully)
