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Is atheism becoming a religion?

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Copyright © 2005,2009 by Zack Smith.
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Introduction

It is typical these days to hear religious people of a certain ilk make the claim that atheists have created a religion out of atheism, for the reason that we reject the existence of any gods, which is a dogmatic stance. This claim is nonsense.

The Reasons

Reason 1: Simply different

Religions typically have certain characteristics which other things do not. Over the years, many cultural anthropologists have taken the trouble to analyze religions that they encounter and to define what constitutes a religion. There are also all-encompassing ideologies that grow to resemble religions, like Communism and Neoliberal economics (Anglo-American capitalism).

But atheism is most definitely not a religion. Here is a list of some characteristics of religion and how atheism compares to each.

Characteristic of religions Does atheism have it?
All-encompassing dogmatism No: Atheism lacks dogmatism. It is a limited rejection of the existence of gods and goddesses; or rather we the assert that they are very very unlikely to exist. Every year science explains more and religion less. Purveyors of religion attempt to sell a crazy belief that there is an invisible man in the sky. We do not buy. Theists misinterpret this as dogmatism when in fact it is a non-transaction the same as not buying a rotten pear at the supermarket. They misinterpret our disgust and frustration over the attempted sale of a rotten fruit and our moral outrage over their scamming other people into buying said rotten fruit.
Churches No. There are none. In the USA there are atheist groups that periodically meet in libraries or cafes but they mainly just comiserate and condemn religion and practice being petty. (In a sense they are continuing the petty mean culture of the religion of a petty mean god they rejected.) But they are just a tiny fraction of atheists and agnostics and not representative of the whole.
Rituals and rites in many parts of life e.g. birth, coming of age, marriage, death None whatsoever. Secular society provides sufficient rites. There is no need to put the stamp of atheism on such rites. The reason why religion does so is that needs to affirm its domination in order to be perpetuated. Atheism continues not because it is imposed in tawdry ways like religion but because it offers the better argument.
Religions have ancient holy books and most adherents will tell you that the contents of those books are sacred and cannot be questioned or criticized. No such thing in atheism: It is a single belief. It is a simple rejection of a dubious offered idea namely the existence of an invisible man in the sky. There are some intellectual works which are held in high esteem but these are not beyond criticism. An example might be The future of an illusion by Sigmund Freud.
Worship of invisible persons or forces. No. Atheism rejects gods & goddesses specifically, but by implication invisible forces as well since such forces are almost always in some way "intelligent". While there are invisible forces that science recognizes such as magnetic fields and gravity, these have been proven to be real.
Myths. For instance about the origin of the universe or the afterlife. None. Atheism does not support or require such myths, nor is atheism explicitly linked to science which offers some theories about the origin of the universe (e.g. the Big Bang).
Provides a sense of identity. Not so. Since atheism is a rejection of the belief of something, it is not a prescription for how to be.

Remember: You do not define a thing by merely talking about what it is not. Thus it tells you almost nothing to explain that a German is a non-French, non-British, non-Spanish, non-Chinese person. If you want to define a thing, then define it, don't tell people what it's not.

Unfortunately for theists who are bent on discriminating against atheists, we cannot be defined as a group. In the real world any two atheists are about as similar as two brown-haired people.

Having a belief in truth being "revealed" by divine powers, usually gods, or revealed by "signs". No. Atheism rejects the existence of such divine entities, so obviously no such revelation can occur. Atheists who support the scientific process (i.e. most atheists) argue that truth is earned through work, specifically using the experiments and observations from which hypothese are drawn and later tested.
Community-building efforts. No. Atheists do not build communities in any signficant sense. True, there are atheist groups that meet monthly in various places, but anyone can witness that these are not communities but are merely gatherings of people who meet to talk about a narrow common hatred of religion, or to comiserate.
Promotion of religious art and culture to support religious dogmatism. No. The cultural legacy of atheism is pretty tame, as you would expect of what is a narrow rejection of belief in the divine. It consists mostly of satire, because after all believing in invisible persons called gods is a very strange thing to do!
Questioning of handed-down "truth" from religious authorities is discouraged or punished. Atheism is separate from science but for scientifically inclined atheists the questioning of handed-down "truth" from scientific authorities is encouraged.
Religion is an entire lifestyle. Atheism is merely an argumentative position that a person takes regarding the religious belief in gods and other supernatural forces.
Theists ignore or deny that their "truth" comes from humans. Atheists accept that insights about truths come only from humans.
Faith in the existence of invisible gods without proof is called a virtue. Atheists often say that faith in the unproveable is foolish and arbitrary.
Religion is reknowned for its use of violence against opposing viewpoints and dissenters. True atheists are never violent because they need not be: Atheists have the superior argument. (Communism which has often been quite violent against many people for many reasons is considered religion-like.)

Reason 2: Bad salesmanship in order to control the masses

Many atheists think of religious leaders as bad salesmen of laughable ideas who use lies, false logic, and cheap manipulations to dupe the gullible masses into accepting their dogmatism, false guilt trips, and unjustifiable limitations on their freedoms. In short, religion is about one set of people taking control of another larger set using ideas.

And yet, the goal of atheists is not to control the masses, but if anything to uplift them, to find in them the more human aspect of rationality, and cause them to reject the more ape-like characteristic that you see in religious people: blind following of (religious) authority.

Reason 3: Dogmatism

What motivates individuals toward atheism varies.
  • Some are escapees from the prison called religion.
  • Some simply insist on providers of "truth" being accountable and honest and open to new truths -- as you see in science.

Atheists can seem dogmatic about the issue of whether any gods exist. But atheists are usually rational people and will admit that there is a trivial, miniscule chance of some kind of god, even though every year scientific advances push that probability down further and further.

  • In the Dark Ages everything was attributed to god.
  • In modern times everything is explained by science and there is virtually no room for gods any more.

Thus atheists' saying there is no god is not dogmatic really, it's a highly pragmatic stance, as practical as saying there isn't a pink elephant standing behind you 24/7. Why believe in something that you know with almost absolute certainty is utterly impossible?

Reason 4: There is no atheist tribe

Individual atheists differ vastly on many topics.
  • One atheist may be a right-winger. Another a left-winger. And yet another rejects both labels as meaningless.
  • One atheist may be anti-Christian and not give a thought to any other religion. Whereas another may reject only organized religion. And another may recognize that religious thinking lurks everywhere.
  • One atheist may only scrutinze and criticize religious authority. Another may scrutinze and criticize all authority because they all engage in the same kinds of lying and manipulation and theft of liberty.
  • One atheist may embrace science and logic in practice. Another may give these only lip service and then go on to be unscientific and illogical (as do those who say Muslims perpetrated 9/11).
What atheists agree on is often just one thing: That there are no gods or at least only a very miniscule chance for gods.

You could say that what two atheists agree on is more or less what that two brown-haired people agree on. Probably not much.

Yet 9/11 shows that some atheists think like believers.

Faith in the existence of gods is foolish, but faith in authority is just plain stupid. World War II should have taught us the lesson that blind faith in authority (the German Reich, the Italian and Spanish fascists) leads to dangerous authoritarianism and disaster. I guess some of my fellow "atheists" didn't have need for history back in school, any more than they did for science.

After 9/11, many found emotional stability in the government's story of what had happened. Many found comfort in the corporate mass media and its professional myth-makers, called journalists. Many atheists failed to use their knowledge of science (if they had any) and failed to think rationally about 9/11. They believed the myth being conveyed by authority (government, media) so suspiciously soon in the days after 9/11 that Muslims perpetrated the attacks.

So much contrary evidence has since appeared, much of it is water-tight, that the official theory has been shown to be a sham. Many atheists however reject all skepticism out of hand, or become highly petty, childish and mocking toward anyone who questions the government and mass media. Such people are malicious fools.

Without shame, many well-known atheists have used 9/11 as convenient evidence of religion's barbaric side. As if the world needed any more evidence... And yet the religion that they condemn is specific: only Islam is targeted. The extraordinary role of Israeli spies before, during, and after 9/11 has been conveniently ignored by such "atheists".

  • The van full of explosives that Israelis were planning to explode in Manhattan on 9/11? Ignored.
  • The arrests of Israelis in New Jersey because they were filming the attacks and then cheering and high-fiveing when the Twin Towers collapsed? Ignored.

Apparently Islam is barbaric (true) but not Israelis who cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers and were arrested by NYPD for it, or Isreali which attempted genocide against Palestinians? How suspicious... The country that alternates between theocracy and quasi-fascism is given a free ride.

If atheism has ever approached being a religion, it is in the lies that so-called atheists spread about 9/11. A mountain of evidence shows that 9/11 was an inside job. Israel was involved. CIA was involved. The Bush Administration was involved. Yet here we find the most extraordinary of things happening: Some atheists and agnostics are showing they have faith after all: In authority.

Invisible men in the sky can't be real.
Yet two buildings fell down cause of oxygen-starved fires?
And a third -- building 7 -- fell down at 5:20pm on 9/11 even though it was not hit by any plane nor by major debris and even though a demolitions countdown was broadcast on police radio. Somehow that was caused by Muslims?
And an airliner can fit into a tiny hole in the side of the Pentagon even though Pilots For 9/11 Truth have obtained the black box data and found the plane did not hit the Pentagon. Yet Muslims were involved?

Know this: Some who self-identify as atheists or agnostics are frauds.

They are merely ex-Christians who still think like Taleban:

  1. unscientifically
  2. irrationally
  3. aligned with authority.
Oh, sure, they reject a certain god. But the rest of the brainwashing remains.

They reject dishonest, lying religious authority but accept every other kind of dishonest, lying authority.

On science and atheism

We live an the age of scientific progress. Science and engineering largely shape the lives of both non-religious and religious people, even if religious people refuse to acknowledge this basic and profound fact.

Despite attempts by the mainstream media to encourage people to believe in UFOs and sasquatches, and despite the US government's ridiculous attempts to cover-up their own major wrongdoing using pseudo-science, like saying that three World Trade Center collapsed because of fires, or that JFK was shot from 2 directions by one shooter, and even if some atheists don't know diddy-squat about science, the scientific way of thinking is the foundation of Western societies.

Consequently atheists as individuals, if asked, tend to support the basic tenet of science, namely that the truth is whatever we currently think is proven true by unbiased experimentation, but that if we learn something new then we must change our ideas. This anti-dogmatic process of finding out the truth prevails in the West because it works.

Differentiating between kinds of atheists

By upbringing

Greater Atheists
People who were brought up without religion are more rational, more inclined toward science, and less dogmatic. We are the Greater Atheists.
Lesser Atheists
Ex-theists are not always as open-minded and rational as those of us who were raised without any religion, as the issue of 9/11 truth shows. People who are escapees from the prison called religion are Lesser Atheists.

By consistency

Anarcho-atheists
These are people who, having observed how corrupt religious authority behaves (lying, cheating, stealing, abusing) have realized that all authority does these things and that it would be inconsistent and even hypocritical to reject religious authority and not all other forms of authority. (See also my essay Good Reasons to Reject Authority.)
Hypocrite atheists
These are people who have selectively rejected religious authority because religious authority is fraudulent and spews lie after lie, and yet, the Hypocrite Atheist then goes on to embrace other highly similar kinds of authority such as the lying government and the lying media, which even a child can see have the same characteristics as religious authority.

Summary

What the issue of atheism becoming a religion probably in reality comes down to is that some theists cannot imagine an opposing idea that is not represented by a well-defined group of people, nor can they imagine a group that is not just like themselves. These failures of reasoning are caused by either their own intellectual laziness or in some cases an inability to cogitate.

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