Is Biotheism a Religion?

TL;DR: Biotheism was conceived as a spiritual worldview rather than a religion. Yet defining religion proves surprisingly difficult, and Biotheism already contains many familiar ingredients: sacredness, ethics, ritual, meditation and questions of meaning.

Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether somebody decides to create a religion, but whether religions emerge as beliefs, practices and communities sustain themselves across a population. By that measure, Biotheism probably isn't a religion yet. What it eventually becomes may not be anybody's decision.

When I first wrote about Biotheism, I was clear about one thing: it wasn't a religion. It was a spiritual framework for finding meaning and reverence in life itself, without requiring a supernatural God, divine revelation or an instruction manual delivered from elsewhere.

Biotheism treated the processes that sustain life, including self-production, self-organisation and self-correction, as worthy of something approaching the sacred. That seemed straightforward, until I made the mistake of looking up what a religion actually is.

It turns out nobody quite knows.

God is apparently optional

For something that has organised human civilisation for thousands of years, religion is surprisingly difficult to define. Some definitions focus on gods, spirits or supernatural realities, which becomes awkward for non-theistic traditions, including some forms of Buddhism.

Broader definitions instead focus on sacredness, ultimate meaning, moral orientation, ritual and community. But widen the net too far, and nationalism, Marxism and possibly even football clubs start to look suspiciously religious.

Religion seems to work better as a family resemblance than as a diagnosis. Traditions overlap in various ways without sharing a single essential ingredient. There is no equivalent to a religious gene.

This was mildly inconvenient because when I went back to look at Biotheism, it had accumulated an awkward number of religious-looking elements. It has something sacred: life and the processes that sustain it. It has an account of how humans fit into a larger order. It has ethics, rituals and meditation.

It also deals with suffering, death, meaning and even gods. And it has something resembling prayer, although I cunningly renamed it attention.

This was beginning to look less reassuring.

Unfortunately, none of this is new

I had imagined Biotheism occupying an unusual territory somewhere between traditional religion and atheism. Reverence without revelation. Spirituality compatible with science. Sacredness without requiring the supernatural.

People were already there. Religious naturalism has explored similar territory for decades, asking whether nature itself can sustain awe, meaning, ethics and spiritual orientation without a supernatural realm. Some naturalists use religious language. Others prefer the language of spirituality. They even argue about whether what they are doing counts as religion.

So Biotheism didn't invent religion without God. It didn't even invent the word Biotheism. I simply joined bio and theism, and later discovered that other people had done much the same thing.

Which is probably how ideas work more often than we admit. Darwin had Wallace. Similar intellectual conditions can produce similar ideas in different places. One person gets associated with the idea, but the ingredients were already circulating.

Biotheism is no different. That makes asking whether I created a religion slightly the wrong question.

Religion may behave like language

I recently wrote about how meaning emerges from language. No individual decides what money, success, nation or God means. Meanings develop through millions of people using, modifying, misunderstanding and passing on words, and arguing about them.

Then those meanings begin organising us in return. Money changes behaviour. Nations generate loyalties. Success reorganises lives. God has had a noticeable effect on history.

Religion may work in much the same way. People create stories, practices, symbols and beliefs. These circulate. Some disappear. Others persist. Practices become rituals. Stories become traditions. Communities form around them.

Eventually, something larger can emerge from those interactions. Sometimes we come to call that larger pattern a religion.

This isn't a new discovery. Sociologists, anthropologists and historians have long treated religions as evolving cultural systems rather than finished packages handed down intact by a single person. But through a Biogenic lens, the process becomes particularly interesting.

A belief isn't a religion. A ritual isn't a religion. Ten people sitting around discussing the meaning of existence aren't necessarily a religion either, though history suggests keeping an eye on them.

Yet, over time, combining beliefs, rituals, stories, identities and communities can produce something new. The parts begin to interact. Patterns stabilise. Some variations survive while others disappear. The system becomes capable of reproducing itself through other minds.

Religion begins to look less like an invention and more like an emergent cultural form.

What happens if other people start using it?

Imagine someone reads about Biotheism and likes the idea of attention as a form of reverence. They begin practising it. Someone else develops a ritual for repairing relationships. A group starts meeting to discuss how the ideas apply to their lives.

They change some of the practices because theirs work better. Another group copies those practices and changes them again. Some parts disappear, while others persist.

Eventually people who have never read anything written about the original idea are doing something derived from Biotheism. At what point did it become a religion?

Who knows? And asking may be beside the point.

Once ideas enter a population, they interact with other ideas, people and circumstances. They evolve.

Perhaps persistence is the missing ingredient

Today, I would still describe Biotheism as a spiritual worldview rather than a religion. There is no substantial community practising the biogenic version of Biotheism. No intergenerational tradition. No established collective identity. No enduring institution.

Nobody's grandmother has taught them the Biotheist evening ritual because there are, as yet, no Biotheist grandmothers.

Perhaps these things matter more than theology. A religion may require beliefs to survive believers. Practices have to be copied. Stories have to outlast the people telling them. The system has to become capable of sustaining itself across a population.

Perhaps the missing ingredient isn't revelation. It's persistence.

So, is Biotheism a religion? For now, probably not.

What happens next, if anything, depends on what others do with it. They may ignore it, change it, improve it, or merge it with something else. The word Biotheism may disappear completely, while some of the ideas continue to travel.

That is how ideas behave. Perhaps that is how religions behave too.

If Biotheism ever becomes a religion, nobody will have founded it. We will simply look back one day and realise that it emerged.