so the GD thread got locked, but atheism as a religion?

[struggle4progress]

15. Atheism and Agnosticism

... these words are what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblance’ words. That is, we cannot expect to find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for their use. Their use is appropriate if a fair number of the conditions are satisfied. Moreover even particular members of the families are often imprecise, and sometimes almost completely obscure. Sometimes a person who is really an atheist may describe herself, even passionately, as an agnostic because of unreasonable generalised philosophical scepticism which would preclude us from saying that we know anything whatever except perhaps the truths of mathematics and formal logic ...

The word ‘theism’ exhibits family resemblance in another direction. For example should a pantheist call herself an atheist? Or again should belief in Plato's Form of the Good or in John Leslie's idea of God as an abstract principle that brings value into existence count as theism ... ?

... The heathen may worship stocks and stones but does not see them as merely stocks and stones. More and more adequate conceptions of God still portray God as limited in various respects. A fully adequate conception of God, Findlay said, would see God as not only unlimited in various admirable properties but also as a necessarily existing being. Thus ‘There is one and only one God’ would have to be a logically necessary truth. Now logic, he held, is tautologous and without ontological commitment. So God's necessary existence would have to be something different from logical necessity. The trouble is how to see what this could be ...

... let us consider the appropriateness or otherwise of someone (call him ‘Philo’) describing himself as a theist, atheist or agnostic. I would suggest that if Philo estimates the various plausibilities to be such that on the evidence before him the probability of theism comes out near to one he should describe himself as a theist and if it comes out near zero he should call himself an atheist, and if it comes out somewhere in the middle he should call himself an agnostic. There are no strict rules about this classification because the borderlines are vague. If need be, like a middle-aged man who is not sure whether to call himself bald or not bald, he should explain himself more fully. This of course assumes that, unlike Huxley, he does not wish to use ‘ism’ words at all. Gilbert Ryle once wrote an article against, though not absolutely against, ‘ism’ words ...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/