Atheism is a religion.

[ManMachine]

MM, you seem to not recognize the difference between rational, evidenced-based philosophies that may or may not allow for naive optimism or be overly ego-centric and blind, retarded, religious devotion.

I don't think religious devotion is retarded. The need to have systems of belief is hardwired into our brains. It's reasonable to suggest they have had some evolutionary benefit for us as a species for a period long enough they have become a permanent part of our neural structure.

I completely accept that we have no idea what form this took prior to the advent of writing, when humans were able to express these ideas in permanent form. But this was probably tens of thousands of years after the neural structures appeared in our brains.

What we can say is that systems of belief have performed a useful function for us, whatever that may be.

'Blind faith', as you put it, also has obvious evolutionary benefits. We need to take some information from others at face value without the need to go find the evidence for ourselves (e.g. don't go in that cave, there is a human eating bear in there).

I can rationalise the human need for both systems of belief and 'blind faith'.

If we accept this as a rational position then we can reason that religion as we know it today is probably predicated on these neural functions, it is also reasonable to ask the question that if these neural functions are still there even when we consciously reject organised religion, then they probably play a part in selecting whatever we choose to replace rejected religions.

That the system of belief we call religion does not require 'rational, evidenced-based philosophies' is beside the point. We make the rules up as we go along, most early scientific theories would not pass the falsifiability test if presented today, Darwin's Theory of Evolution is one of them, Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity is another.

You believe you are right because you believe you are more enlightened than previous, more religious generations because of your 'rational, evidenced-based philosophies', but this notion itself is not rational, there is nothing to scientifically measure this. This is nothing more than 'blind faith' in your own system of belief.

MM