Faux News: Atheism is a religion, too

[Angrboda]

If it's nothing but 'opinion' then why does it have 'news' in the name?

While I'm sure this is just more conservative crap, it's equally unproductive to go entirely the other direction as well. I don't think atheism properly qualifies as a religion, but there is a valid demarcation problem involved. Just as it's not well defined what separates pseudoscience from science proper, just what makes one thing a religion and another thing not a religion is still an outstanding question. For a more relevant example, I was once excluded from being allowed to participate in a comparative religion discussion on a Christian forum because "Taoism is a philosophy, not a religion," and only religious people were allowed to participate. (I had only declared one of my religions at the time.) And indeed there are strains of Taoism which are almost entirely philosophical. (And also, ones that are balls to the walls religious.) I used to consider my Taoism religious based on certain understandings of what makes something a religion, but have since retrenched on that point, and am no longer sure whether my basis for calling my Taoism religious is still sound. There may be other frameworks that I'm unaware of, but Ninian Smart's seven part definition is probably one of the best and least controversial, but it's still very difficult to come to agreement on where on these seven criterion atheism actually lies. Statler Waldorf attempted to make the case that atheism is a religion according to Smart's criteria about two years back. () I'll leave you to make up your own mind.

(And this may be more than merely an academic question. If we could more definitively understand what makes some behaviors religious, and other behaviors not, we would be better able to figure out the cause and nature of those behaviors, as well as protecting secularism and secular efforts from these sorts of attacks, and perhaps more importantly, allow us to appeal to justifications and motivations for them which are both defensible and capable of appealing to the religious on their own merits.)