No, it's just perpetuating the very damaging mindset of 'everything must be codified and spelled out into tedious detail'. Look, I enjoy taking the mick out of religion as much as the next guy, and there are many cases where current practices wrt government treatment of organisations based on faith or philosophical convictions haven't caught up with modern views of separation of governments. And yes, that 'last mile' of leveling the playing field takes some people to make a case for it; and will cause some social strife etc and that's all to be expected in a free society.
However, basing such 'activism' (for a liberal definition of that word) on pedantic (and frankly, juvenile) definition games is not the way to go about such a thing. All it leads to is the actual manifestation of the (satirical, debunked) 'EU regulations on the sale of cabbage' (x). It's pointless, much like the definition of what constitutes 'pornography', or what warrants moderation (see the articles on that topic today and yesterday).
It's not like "This creates a neat conundrum for the lawmaker; what is a religion? " is a new or even insightful question. It has been asked for thousands of years. It's fine to have people writing theses and books about it, but for pragmatic purposes, it's senseless to demand an 'algorithmic' answer where a precise set of rules allows one to machinistically answer it for every possible case one can throw at it. I've been banging this drum many times on this site, but that's simply not how policy making for diverse groups of humans works, much to the chagrin of many of us here who prefer our human interactions with as low levels of ambiguity as possible (for clarity: yes, I'm saying, in a roundabout manner, "let's try to keep our autistic tendencies in check".)
So no, one "must" not conclude that any religion is as much a religion as others. In the end, it's all just social constructs, and social constructs just do not work the way you claim. Courts across the world have ruled on organizations being 'religions' or not, and while here and there there is a debatable one, it's not as indecidable as you make it out to be. (one of my favorite ones is that of the 'Sisters of Saint Walburga' where the Dutch Supreme Court decided in 1986 that an organization that claimed to be a religion with one of its main rituals being offering live sex shows to paying audience members was, in fact, not a religion but rather a sex club masking its commercial leitmotiv behind a claim of religion. Shocker!)
Anyway, TL/DR: Pedanticism bad, common sense good - 'pastafarianism' long in the tooth, let's not encourage anything that gives us even more rules and laws and regulations, it's bad enough as it is with anti-social assholes exploiting corner cases (and that goes for all sides).
(x)
Pythagorean theorem: 24 words
The Lord's Prayer: 66 words
Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
The Ten Commandments: 179 words
The Gettysburg Address: 286 words
The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words
The European Commissions regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words
Attempting to precisely define and codify what characterises a 'religion' is neither useful nor a well-defined goal. I think it would be entirely reasonable to, under the law, accept that if someone claims something is their religion then it is. It doesn't matter if they invented it, if they are the only one who believes it, nor if it is obviously satire; treat them all the same because anything else must necessarily be some convoluted and fundamentally broken criteria.
Beyond that, the problem is that religions aren't just social constructs: they are granted special privileges under the laws of most countries. So the end result of this should be erosion and eventual dissolution of those privileges (though retaining the principle of freedom of religion and the designation of religion as a protected class against discrimination).
However, basing such 'activism' (for a liberal definition of that word) on pedantic (and frankly, juvenile) definition games is not the way to go about such a thing. All it leads to is the actual manifestation of the (satirical, debunked) 'EU regulations on the sale of cabbage' (x). It's pointless, much like the definition of what constitutes 'pornography', or what warrants moderation (see the articles on that topic today and yesterday).
It's not like "This creates a neat conundrum for the lawmaker; what is a religion? " is a new or even insightful question. It has been asked for thousands of years. It's fine to have people writing theses and books about it, but for pragmatic purposes, it's senseless to demand an 'algorithmic' answer where a precise set of rules allows one to machinistically answer it for every possible case one can throw at it. I've been banging this drum many times on this site, but that's simply not how policy making for diverse groups of humans works, much to the chagrin of many of us here who prefer our human interactions with as low levels of ambiguity as possible (for clarity: yes, I'm saying, in a roundabout manner, "let's try to keep our autistic tendencies in check".)
So no, one "must" not conclude that any religion is as much a religion as others. In the end, it's all just social constructs, and social constructs just do not work the way you claim. Courts across the world have ruled on organizations being 'religions' or not, and while here and there there is a debatable one, it's not as indecidable as you make it out to be. (one of my favorite ones is that of the 'Sisters of Saint Walburga' where the Dutch Supreme Court decided in 1986 that an organization that claimed to be a religion with one of its main rituals being offering live sex shows to paying audience members was, in fact, not a religion but rather a sex club masking its commercial leitmotiv behind a claim of religion. Shocker!)
Anyway, TL/DR: Pedanticism bad, common sense good - 'pastafarianism' long in the tooth, let's not encourage anything that gives us even more rules and laws and regulations, it's bad enough as it is with anti-social assholes exploiting corner cases (and that goes for all sides).
(x)
(edit: formatting)