You have to decide what is and is not going to count as a religion, where religion is a concept that makes a meaningful distinction.
The article says that just because your brain lights up when you watch a space shuttle launch like a christian's brain lights up watching a nativity scene, that doesn't mean that you're having a religious experience. Fair enough. On the other hand, I'd say it certainly doesn't mean you're not having a religious experience.
Stirner maintained that Feuerbach's Humanism was just another religion, and rightly so. Similarly with Marx's Communism. For me, and I think for Stirner, the religious outlook is characterized by the intellectual mistake of belief in Objective Value. In both cases, people tied their minds up in knots to where they believed they had discovered Objective Values. Not the values that you objectively actually have, but the values that you should have, must have, have a duty to have, etc.
God exists, or he doesn't. One believes in God as a matter of religion not when you believe he exists, but when you believe that one must serve him, in some peculiar, insane, gibberistic sense of must. When you believe that God sets your "True" values, instead of you.
The same goes for Humanism. If you actually do value the wonders of Humanity, you are not necessarily religious - you just have a preference for what Humanity brings. But if you believe that Humanity is your Objective Value whether or not you subjectively value it in actual fact, then you have a religious outlook with respect to Humanity.
Search for the "Wheels in the Head" section of Stirner's The Ego and His Own for a concise elaboration. http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/enee.html
Today's post, Is Humanism A Religion-Substitute? was originally published on 26 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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