Science is inherently atheistic

[Belacqua]

Your leaders are saying to embrace the atheist church.  

I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to say that atheism per se is a religion. It's true what we atheists often point out: that in the strict sense atheism is merely a lack of belief in a god or gods. 

Nonetheless, we atheists would be disingenuous if we used this strict definition to avoid admitting that each of us has some intellectual commitments by which we judge things, and even some metaphysical principles. And that by and large, the atheists posting here share nearly all of those commitments and principles.


For example, an atheist could be a sort of Neitzschean fundamentalist who holds that the universe is in fact pure chaos, and any order we think we perceive is an illusion created by the mind. That would be compatible with atheism, and there may even be some such atheists out there. 


As far as I can tell, though, every atheist posting on this site (and any other atheist site I have visited) is not such an atheist. We all share the commitment that the facts science tells us are a more or less accurate representation of the way the world is (this is a metaphysical view). 



We hold that the types of evidence given for religious belief (e.g. natural theology, revelation, etc.) do not constitute persuasive evidence, based on our principles concerning what constitutes good evidence. When an atheist says he doesn't believe in God because there is a complete lack of evidence, what he is saying is that he has certain views on what evidence must be, he has evaluated religion's claims based on these views, and he has formed a judgment. 



So the repetition of certain slogans, like bald not being a hair color, shouldn't let us atheists ignore the fact that we do have beliefs (where the term "belief" simply means "I hold it to be true.") And every atheist arguing with you here is a member of a group which shares nearly all of these beliefs in common. 

Which doesn't mean that atheism per se is a religion. But it does mean that your interlocutors here share a system of beliefs.