What Is Religion?, Continued

I should note that immediately after I wrote my previous post about religion as authority, I read a few paragraphs in the same Canadian opinion that talk about how if freedom of religion is what's important then we can't define it in terms of authority figures, it has to be about individual conscience etc. Fine, that's all very well and good. But now I don't see where you draw the line to differentiate between religious and secular belief systems. The Court talks about how defining religions in terms of authority would get courts into the business of scrutinizing what is and isn't a religious authority and which of an individual's beliefs comport with some religious authority's say-so. But what I want to know is, how then do you draw the line between religious and secular beliefs? Taking the Court's definition, literally the only part that actually makes it religious is the bit about "foster[ing] a connection with the divine," and even then it caveats with "or with the subject or object of that spiritual faith." How frickin' porous can you get? Strictly speaking I think I could construct a not-facially-absurd argument for why my overall worldview is religious. And I'm a militant atheist. Now, admittedly, that argument would be BS, but still, I think there are a lot of beliefs that I'd call non-religious that this definition would include. So I'm sort of curious, what criterion can we use to define religion that behaves like a good statistic, i.e. produces the intuitive result somewhat more than 90% of the time but also the occasional counterintiutive one? Specifically, since I imagine people aren't looking to tell people whom intuition would say are religious that no, they aren't, can we come up with a bright line to draw that includes all people we would say instinctively are in a religion and also a small number of those who we wouldn't, and in a logical way? I'm curious what it would be, aside from authority, which would obviously work pretty damn well. And in any event, does anyone really think that whatever criteria we come up with will be things we'd rather have courts parsing than authority? 'Cause to me, that sounds like a quagmire or even a thicket, as Justice Frankfurter might say.

Of course, one alternative would just be to scrap the whole idea of trying to protect freedom of religion above and beyond freedom of conscience. But I guess that was never really on the table, so...