alt Hacker News> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.
It's a good word to use because it has so much in common with western religious traditions.
This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html
You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.