Nature's Laws

[Mudhammam]

  Religions are quite often just another powerful means by which to control people. 

What is religion if it isn't that? If religion was just some privately held belief that inspired a person, even if it was a delusional or patently false belief, it wouldn't be correct to call it 'religion' in my view. It's when this belief, without justification, demands that everyone else recognize it as fact, that it becomes religious---and this is the case with every single "holy" book that man has ever produced.

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By the way, you do know that the original use of 'atheist' was by the Greeks to describe Christians, right?

I don't think so; maybe the Romans used it against the Christians' impiety towards the state religion but as far as I know the first accusations of "atheism" go back to 5th century Greece. Anaxagoras and Socrates were accused of atheism (the latter most definitely falsely), and then there was Theodorus the Atheist (possibly in the true sense) and Diagoras "The Atheist" of Melos, who, according to Cicero,

when Diagoras, he who is called ἄθεος, having come to Samothrace, was asked by one of his friends whether he who thought that the gods were careless of human affairs, did not perceive from so many painted tablets how many there were whose vows had enabled them to escape the fury of the storm, and to make their way safe into port, “That is so,” he replied, “because there are no pictures anywhere of those who have been shipwrecked and have perished in the sea”. Once also when he was on a voyage, and the passengers, alarmed and terrified by adverse storms, said to him that they deserved to fare as they did for having taken him on board the same ship, he pointed out to them several other ships struggling in the same course, and asked whether they believed that those also had a Diagoras on board.

 ἄθεος  - http://biblehub.com/greek/112.htm