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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
Daniel Dennett
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Religion involves social systems where participants believe in supernatural beings and seek their approval.

Daniel Dennett's quote defines religion as a societal construct where individuals acknowledge and engage with supernatural entities. It emphasizes the communal aspect of religious belief, highlighting that religion is not just a personal experience but a collective one, where group dynamics and social expectations play significant roles in how people perceive and seek approval from these higher powers.

Themes

ReligionBeliefSupernaturalSocial SystemsApproval

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the role of religion in society during a community meeting.

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