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xssve -> RE: Court Rules: Atheism is a Religion (10/12/2011 6:42:16 AM)
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ORIGINAL: HeatherMcLeather
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Bullshit, it's a hole where religious belief would otherwise be. No.
http://www.collarchat.com/fb.asp?m=3880763
edit: forgot to purplize. And to add this: You are confusing a religion with a religious belief, they are not synonymous.
You said "religious belief", I'm not confusing anything, just repeating what you said.
Religion is an institution, with religious beliefs, atheism is not an institution, it's more like a philosophy, that may or may not encompass spiritual beliefs not represented by other religious institutions.
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Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.[1] Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.
Wikipedia: Religion
One may have a philosophy that encompasses all of these things without it being a religion, religion is above all, an organized system of beliefs, which is what is confusing you, since it isn't the only form an organized system of beliefs can take - you go that way, and any organized system can be called a religion: Freudian analysis, a football team, a political party.
Religion is a child object of philosophy, not the other way around, philosophy is the parent object, religion is a particular philosophy, organized around a specific model of reality, typically encompassing all aspects of life and death, internally cohesive and consistent, accounting for all unknowns, whereas more general philosophy allows more than hypothetical input, it also includes empirical data, and in another child object of philosophy, science, empirical data is the final authority: if if the hypothesis does not fit the data, the hypothesis is wrong, the data is always right - which is typically the other way around in religion, which tends to ignore or suppress data that is contradictory in favor of the hypothesis.
You can say they are both belief systems, one must have faith in the predictable nature of the laws of physics in order to be a scientist, one must be able to ignore the laws of physics in order to be religious, but only one of them is a religion.
Spiritual belief in science is simply a matter of data, or lack thereof - god, is basically what is called and uncontrolled variable: it's a hypothetical variable, about which one has no empirical data, and hence cannot be subject to controlled experimentation, because it can't be controlled for if you know nothing of it's properties.
"Controlled" means one can test hypothesis, i.e., in a relationship between Two controllable phenomena, you can alter one in order to assess it's effect on the other - if you have an uncontrolled variable in there, you cannot assign cause and effect validity to the results, since it's impossible to assess the effect of the uncontrolled variable.
If you believe anyway, then it called faith, and that is philosophical-religious, but it doesn't suddenly make science a religion, since science too is concerned with the nature of all reality, in which god is simply an unverifiable hypothesis.
Religion, you might say, is a word we reserve for organized belief systems that contain large volumes of uncontrolled variables, which lets out science, since it can only deal with controlled variables.
Thus atheism is philosophy, leaning more towards science than religion, religion wants to explain everything to you, if they don't know, they make something up - the opposite of that is asking questions, and looking for real answers - science.
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