Maybe I haven't made myself entirely clear. I DON'T think it matters whether many practitioners are going through the motions. I took it however that this was a problem for YOUR account--or at least it would be a problem if everyone was just going through the motions.    

[Okay, suppose that everybody is going through the motions, nobody performs the practices because they believe the beliefs, including the clergy, it’s been that way for a long time and there’s no reason to believe that it will ever be any different in the future. However the books articulate a system of practices rationalized by beliefs according to which the practices place practitioners in relation of value to an SR. Part of going through the motions is that people pay lip service to the account in the books. A consequence of my view is that it isn’t clear that the religion survives, because it isn’t clear that my definition is satisfied. But I think this is as it should be, because it really isn’t clear whether the religion survives under the circumstances. So my account is tracking intuitions.]

I'm also skeptical about whether as a matter of fact cultic practices do evolve into relations of value to a sufficiently grand SR. Did the Greeks/Romans believe in their gods? By the Roman period the cults of the official gods were little more than civic rituals. Elite Romans were thoroughly secular and regarded the gods as allegorical figures; hoi polloi worshipped the stocks and stones at the end of the road and did business with daemons.

[I wrote this: “Second, this is the terminus of human religiousity. People sooner or later end up here, often it’s there from the beginning. Once you get into a Supermundane Reality, folks do tend to go for broke. Even very local animism tends to develop into this sort of thing. As this is where we wind up (or begin) it’s good to have a concept that describes the conclusion.”

My claim is that human religiosity tends to evolve in the direction of satisfying my definition. Not that, once reached, it stays there. Certainly once reached a religion(on my account) can devolve, be lost, etc. Also I find it hard to believe that Greco-Roman religion NEVER satisfied my account. Also it’s hard to believe that many of the hoi polloi, even if they worshiped  stocks and stones and did business with daemons, didn’t  also worship sincerely at the temples of the gods. You know, such religions are very syncretic, can include a diversity of practices. (I’ve lived in cultures with a diversity of gods and temples for them. The gods are hard to resist.) Why would people who worshiped stocks and stones be so critical as not to worship the gods too?  Finally I need to emphasize more than I did the word ‘tends.’ I wrote ‘even very local animism tends to develop into this sort of thing.’ I didn’t mean that this happens inevitably or invariably but that it often happens.]

 I'm admittedly flying by the seat of my pants here but by my lights the essence of religion is cultic practice--ritual, ceremony, churchiness if you will. Some religions pick up "philosophies" broadly construed: wisdom literature, "world views," ethics, etc. and become "Great World Religions." Others don't.

[A difficulty seems to me to be this. If talk of God need only be a formality (as in saying ‘God bless you’ when someone sneezes, which devout atheists can do without difficulty) , it’s hard to see why such talk is necessary at all for religion in your sense. Surely what makes religion religion isn’t going to be the presence of certain empty words. But then why won’t birthday parties be religious ceremonies? Why not high school graduations? If people wish to study rituals and ceremonies independent of whether they occur in a religious context, that seems a good idea. But it’s hard to believe that religion extends as far as ceremony does.]