Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
...Atheism is not a religion. This bothers the hell out of me. There is no equivalence between a believing in something on bad evidence and declining to do so.
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I think this depends greatly on how one chooses to define "religion," and moreover how atheism satisfies biologically and socially engrained predilictions towards religious thought and behaviour (
cf. Fozzie_DeBear’s post #202).
I reject the idea that "religion" can be boiled down to a set of world view questions—religion is also a universal form of cultural expression and societal interaction.
So yes, while atheism has removed the concept of god from the equation, proponents are not immune to tribalistic and emotional forces that cause us to think and behave in certain ways that map themselves onto religious behaviour. A number of Cheese's posts in this thread pose an interesting case of this in point: he has assumed a strongly apologetic stance to pontificate his atheism complete with straw man charicatures and an apologetically derived persecution complex.