Well, seeing as I've taken the time to read all this, I suppose I HAVE to respond.
I will concur in respect with Waldorf that Girlysprite's description of the religiousity of Buddhists is off the mark. I am not a Buddhist, but from my limited survey of the religion, it would be a gross distortion to say that most or even many believe in a "higher power". As a Taoist, one might describe the "Tao", conceived as an ordering principle of the universe (perhaps even as an ontogenetic power) as a higher power, but to suggest that the Tao is a "higher power" in the same sense that a theist uses the term is to do gross violence to the metaphysics and beliefs of the Taoist.
Now, on to Waldorf's "proof".
First, what the law decides is irrelevant. The goal of law is justice, not truth. That is, when it's not stooping to crass politicizing. The blacks in the northern United States didn't "spring into existence" as persons with the emancipation proclamation, nor did those in the south suddenly appear when the Confederacy surrendered. And if the thrteenth amendment were repealed and an amendment passed decreeing that blacks were not persons, they would continue to be persons, regardless. Equating truth with the legal is not a tree you want to be barking up, lest you find yourself on a limb about to fall. By the same logic, abortion is "right" and "moral" and those who oppose it are evil. Is this a logical precedent you want to set?
Now as to your use of Professor Smart's framework, some basic questions need to be asked. A) Is it valid, and B) is it being applied correctly. I confess that before today I had not even heard of Professor Smart and his framework, so feel free to correct any misunderstanding of his framework that I have with reference to the primary literature, or at least a respected secondary source (such as a review article).
I'm going to address the second question first. Is it being applied correctly. From what little reading I've done, it appears that Smart intended his framework to serve as a guide -- as noted several places I looked, it's referred to as a framework for "study". It's not at all clear from any of the readings that he intended the 7 criteria as exclusionary criteria (properties or behaviors exclusive to religion) as opposed to inclusive criteria (things which are common to religions but not exclusively to religion). I'll wait for you to provide a citation from the literature that he (and other anthropologists) use the 7 traits as exclusionary criterion (a full-text quote would be super). Failing that, use of Professor Smart's framework to justify treating atheism as a religion is illegitimate, as, if his framework doesn't unfailingly partition the world and its people into religious and non-religious people, your argument is not sufficient. As rainydays alluded to, many things on your list are things that religious and non-religious alike have in common (e.g. curiosity about origins), and given your rather contorted gerrymandering of the evidence, it's clear you could paint anything as a religion (or at least, the apologist whose talking points you likely stole could). To put it in reverendjeremiah's terms, unless you can deterministically apply these criteria and always come up with the right answer, you've got crap.
The first question, is it valid, takes us considerably further afield. It's necessary to point out that anthropology (well, one of two main movements within anthropology) is not one of the hard sciences; it is a so-called "soft science", and it's conclusions have to be qualified accordingly. Where anthropology is scientific, it tends to be purely descriptive; even the more interpretive aspects of anthropology (and sociology) eschew claiming brute objectivity. Where anthropology is neither descriptive nor analytic, it tends to avoid being proscriptive. Is Professor Smart's criteria intended as a means of separating religious from non-religious behavior; I doubt it. Does his framework identify a specific trait or set of traits that should be termed religious? Certainly religious people exhibit these behaviors, that doesn't mean that these behaviors are "the essence" of religiosity. To do is to be? Maybe. But I think it fails on two counts. First, there is something distinctly religious which isn't captured by these criteria; a certain "je ne sais quois" which every religious person understands, and understands differentiates them from the non-religious. Second, again, these traits are far too broadly and ambiguously defined to capture religious behaviors and religious behaviors alone. To borrow a popular meme, regarding Professor Smart's criteria, "Where's the beef?" -- where's the religious in these religious criteria? I'm only briefly going to return to the problem of anthropology being a soft science; while it may "seem" to describe something real and objective, that's a long ways away from demonstrating it; psychology, another soft science, may still apply the tenets of Freudian theory as useful, but I don't think anyone expects Freud's ideas to pan out in terms of neurological structures. I'm not entirely discounting the utility of the soft sciences, but it is generally a fallacy of reification to assume that the concepts obtained in them have simple, concrete correlates. If Professor Smart's framework is only statistically valid, that these behaviors correlate with religion probabilistically, again, you've got crap for a definitive (pun intended) argument that atheism is a religion.
As long as I've babbled on this far, I will point out that I am both a Taoist and an atheist. According to your application of the criteria, I have two religions! The idea that a person can belong to two seperate religions at the same time is generally abhorrent to most westerners, though it is not unheard of in the east. In China, it's common for people to participate in Taoist, Confucian or Buddhist rituals as they apply -- different situations will call for a Taoist answer than that which requires Confucianism. Since none of these three religions contains the concept of a creator god to which the person is beholden, they are also atheists. Not one, not two, but four religions! Well, at the very least, it's clear that your framework can't pick out individual religions (how do we decide when a Chinese person is being an atheist, but not a Taoist; a Buddhist but not a Taoist?). These are the types of questions that a theory, if it is actually a theory of some thing, should be able to answer; if the theory can't differentiate between "is" and "is not", I strongly suspect the object of the theory is imaginary; at best it is incomplete. In addition, there are people who declare themselves not as atheist, but as non-religious; I'm not going to go through your criteria, but they hit many of the same points (some of them are even, horror, "secular humanists" -- Auntie Em, it's a twister!). Essentially, using your criteria as an exclusionary principle, religions will be proliferating at an exponential rate (do we have a separate religion for non-religious Taoists, Atheistic Taoists, and one for Taoists who never gave it much thought?). I'm sorry, but even if Smart's criteria uniquely identify something it's not clear that that something is either useful or a good definition for religion.
I'll throw you a couple bones. I would argue that for many people, atheism does function as a social identity just as for some people, religious or not, white supremacy functions as a social identity. The sociological, anthropological and what-ological purpose that serves, I won't speculate. I will ask however how Professor Smart's criteria separate those behaviors one adopts as a part of a social identity from those behaviors one adopts as part of a religious identity?
I'm not going to go into the Soviet question in any depth other than to say I think atheists dismiss what happened in Russia and Cambodia as irrelevant to them all too readily. That still doesn't make atheism a religion.
And finally, regarding origin stories and Darwinism, it's natural to wonder after explanations for the world, just as it's human to wonder how a magician performs his trick. It's human to want to understand the world, if you're arguing that "to be human" is "to be religious", I'd say you've broadened your net way too far. Yes, there are those who are overly dogmatic about science, those who embrace scientism and even those who deconverted on account of evolution or cosmology; none of these are strictly speaking evidence of religiosity. If I didn't believe in evolution, if I didn't worship the current cosmological model (which itself is a mess) -- if I never read a single scientific statement whatsoever, I would still lack a belief in a god (and it isn't atheism which keeps me in my particularly religious orbit so much as a firm foundation in Taoism reinforced by the lack of any good reason to believe in a god does [and theists like you trying to "explain" to me what the nature of my beliefs are doesn't help]. When theism starts making sense, then I'll allot it more consideration.
I will concur in respect with Waldorf that Girlysprite's description of the religiousity of Buddhists is off the mark. I am not a Buddhist, but from my limited survey of the religion, it would be a gross distortion to say that most or even many believe in a "higher power". As a Taoist, one might describe the "Tao", conceived as an ordering principle of the universe (perhaps even as an ontogenetic power) as a higher power, but to suggest that the Tao is a "higher power" in the same sense that a theist uses the term is to do gross violence to the metaphysics and beliefs of the Taoist.
Now, on to Waldorf's "proof".
First, what the law decides is irrelevant. The goal of law is justice, not truth. That is, when it's not stooping to crass politicizing. The blacks in the northern United States didn't "spring into existence" as persons with the emancipation proclamation, nor did those in the south suddenly appear when the Confederacy surrendered. And if the thrteenth amendment were repealed and an amendment passed decreeing that blacks were not persons, they would continue to be persons, regardless. Equating truth with the legal is not a tree you want to be barking up, lest you find yourself on a limb about to fall. By the same logic, abortion is "right" and "moral" and those who oppose it are evil. Is this a logical precedent you want to set?
Now as to your use of Professor Smart's framework, some basic questions need to be asked. A) Is it valid, and B) is it being applied correctly. I confess that before today I had not even heard of Professor Smart and his framework, so feel free to correct any misunderstanding of his framework that I have with reference to the primary literature, or at least a respected secondary source (such as a review article).
I'm going to address the second question first. Is it being applied correctly. From what little reading I've done, it appears that Smart intended his framework to serve as a guide -- as noted several places I looked, it's referred to as a framework for "study". It's not at all clear from any of the readings that he intended the 7 criteria as exclusionary criteria (properties or behaviors exclusive to religion) as opposed to inclusive criteria (things which are common to religions but not exclusively to religion). I'll wait for you to provide a citation from the literature that he (and other anthropologists) use the 7 traits as exclusionary criterion (a full-text quote would be super). Failing that, use of Professor Smart's framework to justify treating atheism as a religion is illegitimate, as, if his framework doesn't unfailingly partition the world and its people into religious and non-religious people, your argument is not sufficient. As rainydays alluded to, many things on your list are things that religious and non-religious alike have in common (e.g. curiosity about origins), and given your rather contorted gerrymandering of the evidence, it's clear you could paint anything as a religion (or at least, the apologist whose talking points you likely stole could). To put it in reverendjeremiah's terms, unless you can deterministically apply these criteria and always come up with the right answer, you've got crap.
The first question, is it valid, takes us considerably further afield. It's necessary to point out that anthropology (well, one of two main movements within anthropology) is not one of the hard sciences; it is a so-called "soft science", and it's conclusions have to be qualified accordingly. Where anthropology is scientific, it tends to be purely descriptive; even the more interpretive aspects of anthropology (and sociology) eschew claiming brute objectivity. Where anthropology is neither descriptive nor analytic, it tends to avoid being proscriptive. Is Professor Smart's criteria intended as a means of separating religious from non-religious behavior; I doubt it. Does his framework identify a specific trait or set of traits that should be termed religious? Certainly religious people exhibit these behaviors, that doesn't mean that these behaviors are "the essence" of religiosity. To do is to be? Maybe. But I think it fails on two counts. First, there is something distinctly religious which isn't captured by these criteria; a certain "je ne sais quois" which every religious person understands, and understands differentiates them from the non-religious. Second, again, these traits are far too broadly and ambiguously defined to capture religious behaviors and religious behaviors alone. To borrow a popular meme, regarding Professor Smart's criteria, "Where's the beef?" -- where's the religious in these religious criteria? I'm only briefly going to return to the problem of anthropology being a soft science; while it may "seem" to describe something real and objective, that's a long ways away from demonstrating it; psychology, another soft science, may still apply the tenets of Freudian theory as useful, but I don't think anyone expects Freud's ideas to pan out in terms of neurological structures. I'm not entirely discounting the utility of the soft sciences, but it is generally a fallacy of reification to assume that the concepts obtained in them have simple, concrete correlates. If Professor Smart's framework is only statistically valid, that these behaviors correlate with religion probabilistically, again, you've got crap for a definitive (pun intended) argument that atheism is a religion.
As long as I've babbled on this far, I will point out that I am both a Taoist and an atheist. According to your application of the criteria, I have two religions! The idea that a person can belong to two seperate religions at the same time is generally abhorrent to most westerners, though it is not unheard of in the east. In China, it's common for people to participate in Taoist, Confucian or Buddhist rituals as they apply -- different situations will call for a Taoist answer than that which requires Confucianism. Since none of these three religions contains the concept of a creator god to which the person is beholden, they are also atheists. Not one, not two, but four religions! Well, at the very least, it's clear that your framework can't pick out individual religions (how do we decide when a Chinese person is being an atheist, but not a Taoist; a Buddhist but not a Taoist?). These are the types of questions that a theory, if it is actually a theory of some thing, should be able to answer; if the theory can't differentiate between "is" and "is not", I strongly suspect the object of the theory is imaginary; at best it is incomplete. In addition, there are people who declare themselves not as atheist, but as non-religious; I'm not going to go through your criteria, but they hit many of the same points (some of them are even, horror, "secular humanists" -- Auntie Em, it's a twister!). Essentially, using your criteria as an exclusionary principle, religions will be proliferating at an exponential rate (do we have a separate religion for non-religious Taoists, Atheistic Taoists, and one for Taoists who never gave it much thought?). I'm sorry, but even if Smart's criteria uniquely identify something it's not clear that that something is either useful or a good definition for religion.
I'll throw you a couple bones. I would argue that for many people, atheism does function as a social identity just as for some people, religious or not, white supremacy functions as a social identity. The sociological, anthropological and what-ological purpose that serves, I won't speculate. I will ask however how Professor Smart's criteria separate those behaviors one adopts as a part of a social identity from those behaviors one adopts as part of a religious identity?
I'm not going to go into the Soviet question in any depth other than to say I think atheists dismiss what happened in Russia and Cambodia as irrelevant to them all too readily. That still doesn't make atheism a religion.
And finally, regarding origin stories and Darwinism, it's natural to wonder after explanations for the world, just as it's human to wonder how a magician performs his trick. It's human to want to understand the world, if you're arguing that "to be human" is "to be religious", I'd say you've broadened your net way too far. Yes, there are those who are overly dogmatic about science, those who embrace scientism and even those who deconverted on account of evolution or cosmology; none of these are strictly speaking evidence of religiosity. If I didn't believe in evolution, if I didn't worship the current cosmological model (which itself is a mess) -- if I never read a single scientific statement whatsoever, I would still lack a belief in a god (and it isn't atheism which keeps me in my particularly religious orbit so much as a firm foundation in Taoism reinforced by the lack of any good reason to believe in a god does [and theists like you trying to "explain" to me what the nature of my beliefs are doesn't help]. When theism starts making sense, then I'll allot it more consideration.
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