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This is something I've come across in a few religious debates recently, so I thought I'd bring it up here. Take note that this is by no means only a religious argument; it's just one of the two best available examples I have.
The basic premise goes something like this-People have to believe in a religion for it to exist, correct? So, the people, in a sense, are the religion. Therefore, any actions they commit in the name of the religion are, in a sense, committed by the religion, because if everyone stopped believing in the religion, it wouldn't exist.
Example two (more direct)-There's a tree in my front yard. If I start ignoring it, an everyone else who has an interaction with it-everyone from my mailman to the squirrels and birds and bugs who interact with it-if they all start ignoring it, and all act as though it isn't there, is it still there?
Just curious as to what your thoughts on this matter are.

(There's a reason we call them "Christians" and not "Christianities"...)

Religion is distinct from its followers; doctrines can exist (the Bible) without the object of the doctrine (the divinity of Jesus) being believed in.



Just because one adheres to a specific religion does not mean that one follows it perfectly. If my doctrine tells me not to kill and I kill, I've disobeyed it. I committed the act, not my religion.



People who jump off buildings thinking they're Superman die. Human belief is not strong enough to alter reality. The tree is therefore still there (as you will discover when you enter the space that it occupies).



Glad to share them. wink

This depends somewhat on what you mean by 'existence.' There are different types of existence one could classify just as there are different dimensions of reality one could classify.

Functionally, the only existence that 'matters' is that perceived by and sensed by human beings. That has been part of the tradition of the West for quite some time. It is a very human-centric way of looking at things which implies that yes, a religion would cease to exist if no one believed in it.

I have some other thoughts here but they won't quite come out eloquently...

1: Contained within most religions is a hierarchy of authority so those without authority do not necessarily do things as the religion.
And besides, people don't just have one source of motivation for their actions. Maybe if being part of a religion determined EVERYTHING you do you could say they are the religion but otherwise I don't see how you can distinguish the reason for their actions in every case.

2: If you really really were ignoring the tree you would bump into it while mowing your lawn or maybe sooner. If you were only pretending it didn't exist you'd have this spot in your yard that you could never walk through and this weird gap just above it that you couldn't see things through very well.

But the real problem for existence by acknowledgment is when someone ends up in a location that nobody else knows about. If it's dark they stumble around and hit things that they couldn't have had any idea were there.
This concept is a bit foreign to us these days as society has spread around the globe and the only unexplored regions are rather small, like little caves and things.

And lastly if we were just constructing these unexplored things from our imagination whenever we reached some spot that was previously never acknowledged I don't see how we could be so consistent about it. There are lots of processes that people wouldn't have known about when a lot of things were first stumbled in to...
and just think what kind of stuff we would end up with when someone who misunderstood how things worked discovered new objects~