Atheist "church" in London.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I've read and liked some of Alain De Botton's musings, but this is utterly retarded.

It paints atheists as an easy target for theists looking to create a par of argument:

"Oh, those atheists just worship science/Darwin as their god instead! Look, they even have a church!"

*Shakes head*. For someone so smart, Alain De Botton can sure be utterly retarded. I'm not against the idea of atheists meeting up to say hi per se, but to meet up in a sort of quasi-organised fashion talking about things in a pseudo-religious language just destroys any notion that atheism has nothing to do with religion or the religious. For example:

""It's not a church, it's a congregation of unreligious people.""

That's fine, but 'congregation' uses a semantic word play that theists hyper-critical of atheism will just latch onto, and there's no real counter argument except to say "Well we're not all like that". and their response, of course, will be "so when you criticise religion, I can say 'well, we're not all like that either'". But it's missing the point, we're criticising and critiquing the religion, whereas this 'atheist church' will be used to by those who seek to criticise (and point out the flaws in) 'atheism', which isn't and should not be 'organised' in the same way that a religion is.

The only saving grace of this is that it's in the UK where religion (despite still having some considerable influence) is less influential and powerful than in, say, the US. But as this kind of thing transcends borders, I'm still worried about the long term effect it will have (Need I mention Atheism +?).