Is Atheism a Religion? Why or why not?

[Angrboda]

You have no reason to maliciously slander me like that, but of course you're not bound to the Christian Code of Ethics. So I expect that and I forgive you. And oh yes, I did. Go back and read what I showed about the First Cause being what Scholastic Philosophy calls Pure Actuality, A Being in whom there is no Potentiality. Since there is no contingency in the First Being, there is no potentiality in this being either, nothing that He can become that He is already not.

You didn't show anything, you merely asserted it.  For you to have done as you say, a) it would have to be enough for the first cause being pure actuality to establish that the first cause is God, and b) you would have had to show that it is necessarily the case that the first cause is pure actuality.  You didn't do the latter, you simply asserted it to be the case, and the former is simply not the case.  Even if you had made the Thomistic argument instead of simply asserting it, it wouldn't be valid because Thomism isn't an adequate description of reality.  The terms 'pure actuality' and 'potentiality' have no legitimate meaning because neither are substances.

I will retract my implication that you did not make the attempt, however.  It was buried in a reply to Nudger and so I hadn't read it.

Oh, as long as I am bringing out the guns this morning, let's deal with the Thomistic argument. A potentiality exists whenever there are multiple entities that are not in perfect homeostasis. Now the universe, though created by God, is not in homeostasis with him, and so a potentiality exists for both entities. Moreover, there was a point at which the universe did not exist and God did (otherwise the two would exist simultaneously and God could not be the universe's cause). At that point, the potential for God to create a universe with which he is not in homeostasis exists and therefore God necessarily was not pure actuality at that point.