Margaret Atwood claims atheism is a religion

[Jenny A]

The full transcript is here:  http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason...print.html

Mostly what's going on is she's using the words atheist and agnostic in a way we don't here but many people elsewhere do:

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BILL MOYERS: Does that mean you take your stand on the side of faith?
MARGARET ATWOOD: No, no having been raised a strict agnostic.
BILL MOYERS: A strict agnostic?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Strict agnostic.
BILL MOYERS: Not an atheist?
MARGARET ATWOOD: No, atheism-
BILL MOYERS: What's the difference?
MARGARET ATWOOD: -- is a religion.
BILL MOYERS: Atheism is a religion?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You mean it's dogmatic?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Absolutely dogmatic.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
MARGARET ATWOOD: Well it makes an absolute stand about something that cannot be proven.
BILL MOYERS: There is no God.
MARGARET ATWOOD: You can't prove that.
BILL MOYERS: So you become-- what' a strict agnostic?
MARGARET ATWOOD: A strict agnostic says, you cannot pronounce, as knowledge, anything you cannot demonstrate. In other words if you're going to call it knowledge you have to be able to run an experiment on it that's repeatable. You can't run an experiment on whether God exists or not, therefore you can't say anything about it as knowledge. You can have a belief if you want to, or if that is what grabs you, if you were called in that direction, if you have a subjective experience of that kind, that would be your belief system. You just can't call it knowledge.

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So what she really said was that agnostic atheism (which she's calling agnostic) is not a religion but gnostic atheism (which she's calling atheism) is because it requires faith in the lack of a god.   The funny thing is she calls her self a "strict agnostic" by which she means no one can know whether there is a god or not because it's an untestable claim.