Atheists are more organised than ever before but is atheism a religion?

Recently several people with whom I’ve been talking have claimed that Atheism is a religion and this is something that really irks me. Atheism most certainly is not a religion.

Religions share qualities that play no part in Atheism. What I suspect people are thinking of when they make this error is the organisational quality of modern atheism and the fact that atheists are increasingly joining various groups or “camps”.

The main characteristics of religion are:

• A belief in supernatural beings.
• Objects, places and even times viewed as “sacred”.
• Ritual acts focused on happenings, objects, places and times.
• Moral codes that have supernatural origins.
• Prayer and/or communication with supernatural beings.
• Social groups based on shared belief systems.

Atheism has none of these characteristics apart from perhaps the last one to a very small extent and only as a relatively recent development.

My parents were church goers and I got dragged along to Sunday School and Church in the 1970s. I hated it with a passion, mostly because I knew I had something better to do, like watch the end of “Thunderbirds” or “The Banana Splits”.

We were members of a High Anglican church but I never had the feeling that our church was any more than a social occasion for my mother to get dressed up and show off her newest hat. After church we would all get ten pence worth of sweeties at “Bobbies”, a nearby newsagent that opened on Sunday morning. We would meet other kids at Sunday School and play conkers or swap marbles with them.

Church attendance was certainly higher then than it is now but most church goers didn’t seem to be taking religion that seriously. It was a duty and the hour or so spent listening to a crusty old fool banging on about Sodom and Gomorrah was rewarded with some good nosh after the service and a pint or two at the local for the adults while the children played in pub gardens. It was all very pleasant and civilized.

Religion in the 1970s was dying. Anthony Trollope once said “The Church of England is the only church in the world that interferes neither with your politics nor your religion” and never was this more so. As an elder of my teenage fold I firmly believed that by the time I was my father’s age, religion would have become virtually extinct. In my twenties nothing remarkable happened to change this view. Religion was a joke and almost everybody knew it. But then came the twenty-first century and all that changed in the blink of an eye.

In 1997 Britain had a new government and its leader, Tony Blair, was a Christian. Most thought he was a normal passive modern-day Christian. It took 19 angry young Muslims to change that perception and then we saw him for what he was; a crusading, sword-wielding self-righteous man.

9/11 changed everything in one fell swoop and we are still living with the consequences of that change today. Orwell’s nightmare vision of nineteen-eighty-four was real after all and Mr. Blair (of the Orwell variety) was just out by a decade or two. New Labour used the Magna Carta as toilet paper and introduced the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Councils spied on people, CCTV became widespread and it was all done in the name of “security”.

Religion naturally reared its ugly head again and just as we thought it was all over the madness had a rerun to top all reruns. Fundamentalist religious types all started seeping out of the woodwork to add their tuppence worth to the “debate”. They used the new media to spread their message and suddenly it seemed like we were all surrounded by crazy lunatic fanatics. It was worse than that. Their views were being taken seriously by the mainstream.

Atheists until then were, for the most part, content smug people who thought “let these fools believe what they want, it can’t do much harm” but after 9/11 and then 7/7 nobody was thinking that any more. Religion was all very well when its main raison d’etre was showing of a new hat to the congregation on a Sunday but when planes were flown into buildings and 2974 innocent people were murdered live on the world’s television screens atheists, like the rest of the world, made a fundamental shift.

Richard Dawkins had written six books before the Twentieth Century ended, starting with “The Selfish Gene” published as far back as 1976. He made his mark and had a small following but not many knew of him until this century when he made several documentaries and then, in 2006 published, what is perhaps regarded as his most contentious work, “The God Delusion”. With this book he pulled no punches. Just the title was enough to make every vicar in the land drop his choirboy and choke on the Host at the Holy Communion.

Suddenly atheists were getting organised. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and many other atheist intellectuals enjoyed a following like never before. There were lectures at Berkeley, there was “The Brights” movement and in 2006, the same year that Dawkins published “The God Delusion”, Bobby Henderson published “The Gospel of The Flying Spaghetti Monster”. On the Net there were atheist chat-rooms, forums and websites.  Atheists were coming in from the cold.

Atheist groups are still a loose collection of small collectives but the concept as an organised movement is quickly gaining momentum. Last Thursday The Times newspaper reported on Britain’s first atheist summer camp for children set up by Edwin Kagin, a 68-year-old American lawyer who set up his “Camp Quest” organisation in 1996 after hearing of a Scout turned away from camp because he admitted to being an atheist.

I suspect that it will be some time before atheists have a world organisation of their own. For one thing, it is not in an atheist’s nature to be a joiner. Until very recently atheists saw no need to profess a belief. It was their lack of belief and therefore their lack of willingness or organise as atheists that defined them.

Today, surrounded with religious argument and in an increasingly politically correct society where there is so much intolerance towards any kind of religious criticism, many atheists are starting to realise that silence just isn’t enough. They are quite rightly asking “Have we been too tolerant of religion?” and “Is it time to start kicking religion up the arse?” Atheists are now crying out for a focal point, an organisation; dare I say it, a church around which to congregate. Books by atheist intellectuals and Flying Spaghetti Monsters are all very well but are they really the the glue that will help to create a sane future without gods?

Atheism is not a religion but if atheists are to evolve and win the battle for hearts and minds then maybe it is time it became one. Maybe atheists need to get more vocal, get more militant and above all, get more organised.

Filed under: Atheism, Religion, Camp Quest, Edwin Kagin, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, The Brights, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene