(December 10, 2018 at 2:07 am)pocaracas Wrote: Way back in 1999, I became a National Geographic magazine subscriber. Kept that subscription until 2016, when I let it run out. Why?
Towards the end of 2015, National Geographic was bought by Fox. With that, some of its articles became biased to reflect Fox's views.
The article you show here is from 2016 and is a prime example of that bias.
It's true that, when you poll people about their religion, you need to include the option of "none". Personally, I think the most honest category for these "nones" would be "N/A" (not applicable). This would make it clear that a religious label makes no sense for this group of people and would have saved us the effort of even having to refute the claim that atheism is a religion.
Society's biases show through in that faulty categorization, I suppose.
About the atheist churches, they exist, yes. Some people leave their childhood faiths, coming to be aware that their previous beliefs were erroneous, but still feeling the need for the social connection that a church gathering provided. We are, after all, social animals.
To maintain such a social gathering, some groups have come to mimic many of the church's rituals, but with no deity involved, nor invoked.
As it is when I join a group of friends to go play football on a rented pitch, where each of us contributes to the rental, I suppose those atheist gatherings also need to pay for the space they occupy and thus require those attending to contribute. While the groups are small, everyone needs to pitch in... As the groups become large enough, socialist standards start to apply and those who can afford more tend to contribute more, while those who can't, can contribute nothing. One can say that the Christian church is auto-socialist in this regard, as people do this by themselves, without the church imposing anything.
Everything has bias. Even when we don't want to interject bias, it still happens. Atheism has made itself religious because it keeps adding components. Heck, even the atheists in the PRC study I linked previously had a positive numerical value of atheists saying they were "religious." Back in the day, there were really only two "none" options when it came to non-belief in any god. You were either atheist or agnostic. Then it went to "hard" and "soft" atheists. Now I can't count the different versions because there are too many. Same thing has happened with Christianity and Islam. It started out simple, then people naturally branched off in different directions. I would be willing to bet my last nickel that the same thing continues to happen with atheism. They're already splitting their churches and excluding certain groups. Really, it wouldn't concern me, but I don't like when one religion (or belief system) sets its goals to eliminate everybody else. If you don't want to believe in God or god(s), then don't believe. And if people want to believe, they should be able to do so without some silly "war" against them. If someone asks me to go to their church out of good will, regardless of what religion it is, I would probably go if I had nothing else to do. Even if I don't agree, I still might learn something, especially about the culture I live in, but if their goal is to bad mouth others, then I would probably have to pass.