RE: Margaret Atwood claims atheism is a religion
July 8, 2015 at 6:40 pm
(This post was last modified: July 8, 2015 at 7:18 pm by Metis.
Edit Reason: Posted link in wrong language
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(July 8, 2015 at 6:19 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: Atheism is a religion the same way the vacant lot next door is a McDonalds.
It's certainly not a religion in the conventional sense, but I do think she is trying to raise a valid point but is using the wrong words or rather using them in an unfamiliar way to express herself.
Religion of course is a very vague term, it can encompass everything from a belief to a series of traditions or rituals totally devoid of belief in any supernatural realm. Timothy Fitzgerald's book The Ideology of Religious Studies is a very good exploration of this, one I very much recommend.
We're used in the west to Religion referring specifically to belief in a deity, but elsewhere especially in the far east it can mean so much more, even just a world view as in the case of Modern Daoism or Confucianism.
Of course there is no solid "atheist code of practice" like there is a list of "thou shall nots" in the Qu'ran, but many Atheists do tend to lean far more strongly to liberal and libertarian views than mainstream society. That coupled with a strong conviction that God does not exist might be worthy of the term.
Socialism is often described as a religious system in Religious Studies departments because it is an all encompassing world view, indeed several leading scholars including the founder of the discipline itself Ninian Smart devoted several works to justifying why the USSR could be described as a theocracy.
We're too used to religion specifically meaning Abrahamic religion, because when we put the Brights next to an Eastern New Religious movement like Happy Science in Japan (yes this is a genuine religion that claims 12 million membership, which is likely to be inflated but not entirely negligible, and has its own political party http://en.hr-party.jp/) such a comparison might not be so far fetched.
Atheists may generally not have the centralization of the Happiness Realization Party, but like the Confucians who are perhaps even less centralized (they have no "Bright" movement for instance) they do hold very similar opinions on many issues, especially within the realm of morality and social issues.
