Would you consider atheism to be a religion?
I've always understood faith to be tied directly to religion and God or Gods.
If atheism is considered a religion, is it possible to "have faith" that no God exists?
Some atheists deny it is a religion. One stated it this way... calling atheism a religion is like calling baldness a hair color.
Others claim it to be a religion.
Please don't get defensive, or take this the wrong way.
I'm asking these questions because I'm trying to understand this point of view, varied as it is.
faith noun \ˈfāth\
: strong belief or trust in someone or something
: belief in the existence of God : strong religious feelings or beliefs
: a system of religious beliefs
The answer to this question is an emphatic
No. But in order to get to the differences between monotheistic religions and atheism (not to mention the difference between atheism and well-understood polytheisms), it is going to take some time. It'll take some careful writing and careful reading. I've battled with myself over whether it is worth it for me to devote this time to writing; part of me thinks that it will not be received well, regardless of my care. I'm pretty sure this is 30 minutes that I'll wish I could have back. But here it goes....
FYI, I'm just gonna dive in without any prepared answer, so this will be loosely structured...
The first thing to mention is that the beliefs that underpin "atheism" are of a fundamentally different kind than the beliefs that underpin your version of monotheism. So, "atheism" will not make sense according to the logics, feelings, or tendencies of your belief system. You're going to have to put that down, and reach for something different, in order to get it. I've learned to distrust your ability to do that, and it's actually for other people that I've decided to write.
Part of the problem with defining atheism is in the very word "atheism". It purports to define something by
calling it what it isn't: a-theist; or someone who believes in the
lack of a God. Now, you wouldn't define Christianity in the same method. You wouldn't say Christianity is
not a belief in Zoroaster,
not a belief in Iris,
not a belief in Jupiter, etc. until the last person(s) left in the historical register was Jesus and YWHY, right? You get a very poor definition of things if you try to define them by negation; good definitions are only had by defining things positively. We practice the negative method all the time, though, because it can be a good shorthand. I did it here:
Atheists are united in the belief that there is no pre-determined design in creation. There is no plan. There is no God. I figured you knew that already.
It is for these very reasons that many "atheists" don't use that term to define themselves... and maybe they shouldn't.
The question becomes, then,
what are the positive attributes of "atheism"?
Before I give the briefest of outlines, I want to say that this has been written about for well over 500 years. There's a clear genealogy of writers that goes back to Spinoza, and there have been others that stretch back to the very inception of monotheism as an idea. In other words, if you cared to really look into this stuff, you'd find mountains upon mountains of information.
To be fair, most everyday folk run into the type of atheist that is happy to play the reactionary to monotheism. They are happy to lob out equally universalizing and grand theories of
Truth or
not Truth; they never realize that they merely play the game that monotheists like to play because they stop asking their own questions. I think this is the type of atheist that Gameface mentions (the type that is likely to default back into religion). It probably to this group that you're pointing when you try to define atheism as a religion.... which would be like defining the values of a family by looking only at the runt... or defining the values of a kingdom by looking only at the jester.
There are also the types of atheists who just don't comprehend the idea of the supernatural. It doesn't make sense in their over-riding pragmatism, they have no use-value for it, etc. For many of these atheists, the term "atheism" can be pretty easily discarded as tool for defining themselves, so they rarely critically engage with it. I've found them to be easily drowned out by the aforementioned atheists.
There are other "atheists" for whom 'nature' is nothing but 'the supernatural'. There is no distinction between them, because nature is in a constant state of invention with no pre-determined outcomes (even though, from the perspective of human consciousness, there are a lot of apparent redundancies). For them, there is wonder at brushing with and understanding the forces that bring stability, the forces that seem miraculous in their ability to bring change, etc. I could go on and on. The possibilities are
infinite--in contrast to monotheism's finite possibilities (i.e. ONE god).
You could say that, vis-a-vis Christians, these people have a fundamentally different understanding of what a "thing" is. For Christians, a "thing"
is and
remains what it is (or maybe changes slightly) because of a plan or some other way of describing a pre-determined result. It does not have agency in history; it cannot follow it's own path toward something new. Christians don't believe in evolution. A positive atheism understands that "things" are named and described by human consciousness
ex post facto, or
after they have undergone change in the present. They understand that it is the conceit of human recognition, reason, time, etc. that they are understood as unchanged/unchanging.
This is a way of saying that "things" don't arrive in the present; rather, the present arrives and spirit-matter* separates itself into "things" after a period of mixture. There is no Truth that precedes these mixtures in which to believe, therefore it is very sloppy (**** it... it's just plain incorrect) to refer to this kind of atheism as a belief structure like a monotheism.
This could be roughly summarized as a belief in
multiplicity (a complex term used by many in the genealogy of writers that I mentioned earlier). I won't get deep into that here. Perhaps it's sufficient to say that it is a belief in
difference .... actually it is better to say
differing differences. These differing differences encounter one another and set off novel trajectories... absolutely unknown and unknowable beforehand (thus the term "supernatural"). This is held to be true even if the world is stable enough that we're able to have a handful things about which we can have good hypotheses. If a positive atheist talks about "mysticism" it's usually from the perspective of wonder about how spirit-matter is knit together in a way that has any knowable consistency whatsoever. They have a great respect for THIS WORLD. And if they take offense, it's often because of the way monotheists disrespect THIS WORLD by calling it a testing ground or some other parable of a place. For atheists, THIS WORLD is all there is, so there can't be anything more precious.
These last three paragraphs begin to answer the red question... but I'll stop now because of the niggling feeling that this is tl;dr.
I have stated that atheism is an expression of faith and I got a strong push back.
And you should have.
*I say "spirit-matter" here in order to avoid the bad distinction between spirit and matter, which is everywhere in religious and scientific writing.
