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Originally Posted by Calgaryborn
1) Atheism is the belief that there is no God. That takes faith. Only an agnostic(if any truly exist) has not put their faith in some understanding of God. In my opinion it would take a lot of faith to believe there is no God.
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That is an interesting point with some validity. Margaret Atwood made the same point Sunday on the excellent Faith and Reason series on PBS:
BILL MOYERS: Atheism is a religion?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You mean it's dogmatic?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Absolutely dogmatic.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Well it makes an absolute stand about something that cannot be proven.
BILL MOYERS: There is no God.
MARGARET ATWOOD: You can't prove that.
BILL MOYERS: So you become-- what' a strict agnostic?
MARGARET ATWOOD: A strict agnostic says, you cannot pronounce, as knowledge, anything you cannot demonstrate. In other words if you're going to call it knowledge you have to be able to run an experiment on it that's repeatable. You can't run an experiment on whether God exists or not, therefore you can't say anything about it as knowledge. You can have a belief if you want to, or if that is what grabs you, if you were called in that direction, if you have a subjective experience of that kind, that would be your belief system. You just can't call it knowledge.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/print/fait...106_print.html
I suppose atheism is dogmatic, but it does not seem like religion to me, and has none of the other trappings.