On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 10:47:29AM -0800, Frank Mayhar <frank at exit.com> wrote: > Randi128 at aol.com wrote: > > Atheism is a religeon of non-belief in > > god. So even atheists have a religeon. > I dare you to say that on alt.atheism.moderated! (Boy, would _you_ be > sorry! :-) > > In my life (and in that of any of the other atheists I know), religion > plays no part whatsoever. Atheism is quite emphatically _not_ a religion. > (Of course, one can make it so, but then one can make pretty much _anything_ > a religion.) Atheism can be defined as faith in the non-existance of God, above and beyond the evidence available. That's very similar to religion and many atheists treat it as such, absent the trappings of ceremony and ritual. You could make an argument that baiting the religious constitutes ritualized worship, though. Agnosticism is a better non-religion claim. While there is no clear and unequivocal evidence for God, there is no way to prove not-God, thus leaving strong atheism in the position of the religions it despises. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt