Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[Belacqua]

I've been denied employment, housing, and had property vandalized for no other reason than I have a Catholic-sounding surname.  It was EXACTLY that sort of treatment that (briefly) radicalized me and sent me into the streets. 

So you are an atheist, and in terms of the conflict you are identified as a Catholic. The people who discriminate against you have no idea of your beliefs. They aren't treating you badly because of the way you take communion, or your views on the Trinity. They identify you with a tribe. 

I'm sure I would be radicalized as well. I've never been so livid as when I was denied housing by a potential landlord because I wasn't Japanese. ("We feel you'd be more comfortable with your own kind.") And I'm sure my experience was a tiny fraction of what you've been through. 

I've honestly never given as much as two shits about a united Ireland, one way or the other. For me, and for a LOT of people I know, the discrimination and violence (sometimes fatal) was religion-based, the political aspect was either non-existent or peripheral.

I think that the denial of housing is not a theological or religious issue, it's a tribal issue. And when we look to the historical reasons for the enmity between so-called Catholics and Protestants, it has to do with English rule and not beliefs concerning the role of saints in prayer. The fact that the discrimination has become detached from history and has devolved into local hate and violence doesn't change its origins in history, and it doesn't mean that it's changed into theology. It has changed into discriminatory aggression between two inherited non-credal groups. Wikipedia is careful to call it "ethnopolitical" because it isn't really ethnic -- I assume both sides are indistinguishable in terms of skin color or other traditional ethnic markers. And it is political in terms of local arguments about who has the desire to discriminate against whom. 

The fact that you're defining it as "religious," when it has nothing at all to do with beliefs, is interesting to me. In this usage, a religion is determined by the sound of your surname. It's possible to be both Catholic and atheist. You could be Catholic and Zen Buddhist, as far as your enemies are concerned. So it's understandable you'd dislike religion when you define it as groups determined by birth, unrelated to personal belief or practice, that cause irrational discrimination. 

"Religion" ends up being a word with no definition -- or several incompatible definitions. I think of religion as a set of beliefs and practices, but in this case it's entirely unrelated to beliefs and practices. It's operating in the way that formerly political parties in Italy did -- the Guelphs in Italy stopped being a political alignment and became an inherited tribe.