Jeff Russell

Yeah, I think his core insight seems mostly right to me: humans think "religiously" no matter what, and long-standing organic ways of shaping that thinking are less likely to have egregious traps still there, whereas short-lived, artificial ways of shaping that thinking are almost guaranteed to have them. I think he gets (over?) excited about "ideology" as a label for the second category since he was/is literally in his own words obsessed with how Communism and Fascism (definitely ideologies) caused so much badness. But I think, if anything, your point about the need for the divine/transcendence might be even more important than the "incompleteness" of ideologies like Communism, which is what he mostly focused on in Maps of Meaning. Don't know how much that's changed for him in the last few years.

And agreed on over-attachment to definition games. I think it's a symptom of Vico-style "barbarism of reflection" where for highly abstract, linguistic thinkers, the name "is" the thing. Regular contact with stuff that can be meaningfully experienced in ways that aren't its name or how to talk about it is a helpful reminder that words, as useful as they are, are just pointers, and fairly arbitrary ones at that.