It is established in the precedent of US law that atheism is considered a religion. However, most atheists here like to take the position that atheism is not a religion. I'm curious as to where the various atheists here stand on this.

It seems hypocritical of "atheists" (as a generic descriptor) to fight to have the court of law and declare atheism to be a religion in order to get the benefit of having rights granted to you under that status, while attempting to intellectually defend atheism as not even containing a single affirmative belief within it.

If you had the power to legally declare atheism no longer a religion, would you do it? Why or why not?

(I don't think this has been discussed before, but I could be wrong. Maybe it's one of the first "new" topic of discussion that we've seen in quite a while.)

Was this a supreme court decision? I did a search and did not find that atheism specifically was declared a religion for purposes of the equal protection clause, secular humanism was (are you equating secular humanism to atheism?) [a supreme court decision was referenced] See link below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/1...n_6095776.html


Lawyers are a strange subspecies.


I would declare atheism a disease, similar to reading Hegel and believing his tripe.

That's far more recent than what I was thinking of. I wasn't even aware of that.

I was thinking of something from about a decade ago. I had to dig around a bit to find the actual case law to make sure that what I remembered was accurate:

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1467028.html

Now, I of course grant that law declaring something to be something doesn't make it that something (see "tomato is a vegetable"), but that's not relevant to the question at hand.

I think someone can be a religious atheist. There are Churches for Atheism. I guess it comes down to how you define a religion and how you define atheism.

I think these are good definitions for both

Religion:
A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence. Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that aim to explain the meaning of life, the origin of life, or the Universe.

Atheism:disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.

You can easily be an atheist without holding any other shared beliefs with any group. I am an atheist but I find most of the stuff I believe to be very different than most atheists. One big thing for me is I wish there was a god and specifically wish the Christian God to be real.

Also, as defined atheism is really just a default position. It can of course be more than that if you are a "strong atheist" or someone who says "god does not exist". But not accepting a claim is really the position everyone should take until convinced. I don't see how any singular answer to one claim is sufficient to call anyone "religious"

This claim is far from obvious and controversial. But that's something to discuss in a different thread.

I will also point out that you didn't answer the question:

No.

Its legal status has no discernible or significant impact on my life.

If I had the power to legally declare killer whales to instead be labelled as 'sea pandas' I wouldn't, for the same reason.

Damn that pragmatism.

Cuts through questions like this, just as Occam's Razor cuts through unnecessary notions like 'objective morality' ^_^

Since theism isn't a religion, it would be strange to count atheism as a religion.

That said, law usage of terms doesn't necessarily follow dictionary logic (and often for sound reasons).

This doesn't really sound like pragmatism to me. You're not citing practical consequences of accepting it as true. This is more like status-quo-ism.

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This seems like simple equivocation.

That's why the phrase "for purposes of the First Amendment" is repeated. It's not ruling that atheism is a religion for all intents and purposes rather this individual group is covered by certain rights that others have. I'm no lawyer but I don't think this ruling does anything like cover all atheist groups or atheism in principle as religious.

When people say atheism isn't a religion they typically mean that it doesn't entail any specifics further than absence of belief in God(s). They don't mean that no atheist groups should have similar legal standing to existing religious groups.

Others might provocatively call is hypocrisy.

Right, so the position is that "we" (atheists which aren't even part of a collective group with any shared beliefs) want to be treated like a "religion" (in an organizational sense even though there's no real sense in which we are a religion) in order to gain rights and privileges defined for religious organizations.

Would you accept the opposite direction? That "we" (religious people who are part of a collective group) want to be treated like "not-a-religion" (in an organizational sense) in order to gain rights and privileges defined for non-religious organizations? (Say, anything in which you say "separation of church and state" to deny access to?)

Not "we". Kaufman and his group specifically. Kaufman's atheist group can have properties that grant it legal protection under laws for religion without that saying anything about "atheism" in the simple sense of "absence of belief in God(s)". Kaufman's group doesn't appear to be necessarily absent of shared beliefs like the we you talk about. This is the equivocation: that Kaufman's atheist group and atheism are the same thing. That atheism isn't a religion doesn't imply that an atheist can't be religious.

I'm not sure I understand your question. What rights and privileges do non-religious organisations have that a religious group would try to gain?

You state this as it's restricted to just Kaufman's case, like that was the first or last time that this has been done.

What you're seeing is also the effect that many religious people understand, which is "that person/group/organization doesn't represent me" yet they get lumped into the characteristics of that group by name. For example, I can come back and say that "what some Christians do" and "Christianity" aren't the same thing. And you know how those conversations go. So why can't it be turned back around in the opposite direction?

Can you think of anything in which a religious person was somehow restricted from doing something based on their religiosity? Those things. Because you want to distinguish the "we" to just Kaufman's group, I can restrict my perspective to just individuals, too.

I don't find there to much tension here, and mainly consider it an artifact of a legal system that gives privileged benefits to "religions". Athiests quite reasonably would like a range of legal protections, that they can't be discriminated against for their view, and broadly receive similar benefits as would other people with other beliefs. However, our legal system privileges "religious beliefs" in particular, so by legally classifying atheism as a religion one gets the practical solution of these various legal benefits. Perhaps it would be nice to rewrite the first amendment with words other than "religion", but we are stuck with what we have. That the content of an atheists views are typically more of a rejection of religious beliefs than religious beliefs themselves doesn't seem particularly important for this practical matter.

What would you propose to replace "religion" in some idealized world? What sort of organizational concept do you feel would be a good equivalent to use?

Also, it's not yet clear to me that it would be equitable to remove explicit protection for religious organizations while still maintaining explicit prohibition for religious organizations through separation of church and state. This leads right back to what I was asking Bladesman about.

Right. If you only focus on the law and nothing else, then you only need to reconcile the law to itself. And that's kind of boring.

Exactly, which is why the thread itself is sort of boring. We have this asymmetric legal structure that codifies "religious beliefs" as something special and so for the purpose of fitting with that legal system atheism might get classified as a "religion". But this has more or less nothing to do with the actual nature of an atheist's beliefs or lack of belief; indeed, the legal system SHOULDN"T be a function of the actual nature of the persons views. We can delve into the "boring" law business (see below) but the tension you are trying to identify between the legal classification and how one might refer to oneself just isn't a big deal in my view.

The basic principle here is that legal treatment of theists and atheists should be the same. So I wouldn't want governments able to make laws privileging athiests, for instance, either by, say, preaching athiesm in schools or whatever. I don't know if I have a particularly good replacement label (indeed...I'm not bothered by being an athiest in a "religion" forum either), but whatever language was chosen it would certainly need a large legal canon - much as there is for "religion" to suss it out.

But the law does have to reconcile with social structures. And that's where I think it gets interesting and not boring.

On the other hand, social identification really is a big deal.

If the basic principle is that "legal treatment of theists and atheists should be the same" where do you stand on separation of church and state? That would be an asymmetric treatment.

Meh, it's mainly just a nomenclature thing. Legally, we give protections to "religions". So it is just a debate about whether you want to call atheism a "religion" or not. Legally, we say yes to this question, which seems to fix the various protections issues atheists might want to have. Socially, some atheists might not want to call it a religion. I personally don't really care that much; I'm happy to expand the definition of religion to include athiesm, and I'm happy to find some other more general word, and I'm happy saying "religious beliefs or lack there of" every time - take your pick.

But let's assume I'm a strict adherent to the view that atheism is not a religion, yet fight legally to have it recognized as such. I suppose it would be slightly nicer if the law had language in it that "reconciled" exactly with this view. But so what? It only takes a couple sentences to explain that the legal support is because the legal system historically privileges religions and so by piggybacking on that we can get the benefits even if we like to maintain philosophical differences between our views and the views of religious people. n



Doesn't the quote answer the question? We shouldn't have a government sponsered endorsement of atheism in all the various ways we reject government sponsoring Presbyterians.

Well I don't want to use "we" for a group I'm not a part of. There's no hypocrisy on my part like you talk about in your OP. It's still not clear to me that Kaufman's group (or any similar groups) arguing that they're religious in the specific context of First Amendment rights is the same as arguing that they're religious in the general sense of say this forum's name.

I can think of instances in which people of certain religions have been restricted. I'm still not sure where this is going because I can't think of any instances where I support someone's rights being restricted because they're religious.

I don't see how rejecting a claim is not the default position considering the only alternative is to accept the claim. We should generally avoid accepting claims by default.


No, because I do not care if atheism is "legally" defined as a religion. It doesn't effect me and I do not think it would effect most atheists. I think some atheists groups should get the same rights as religious groups but I do not think all atheists should get the same rights as religious people just because they are atheists.

But this precisely is the conflation issue. Legally, If "religion" is not the specific category generally understood as religion (which is not the same category of what is legally defined as "religion"), then this statement is now reduced to any gathering of persons who "come together and discuss some particular idea."*

This leads to your statement above not being particularly about atheism but "atheism" (at least according to your presumption that "religion" was not the appropriate category), and so we're now faced with government being able to endorse any organization. Consider that a (highly simplified) expression of separation of church and state is that organizations that receive government money cannot talk about Jesus without being in violation (Jesus being both a religious and "religious" topic).

Under the much more broad concept of "religion" it seems that the (highly simplified) expression of "church" and state would be that organizations that receive money cannot talk about ... anything at all? Consider the number of government funded advocacy groups. Would advocacy of anything now be restricted in the same way that advocacy of Jesus' teachings are restricted? If not, what is the reasoning?

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* http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1467028.html

Note that you are back to talking entirely about the boring legal question, not the allegedly interesting tension between the legal and social aspects.

My understanding of current law is that it is already very loose and permissive on what qualifies, and that while there is a "sincerely held" test on ones "sincerely held religious beliefs", the restrictions on the type of content are fairly broad. Indeed, the supreme court has repeatedly held that the definition of religion includes atheism. I see your slippery slope (if we include atheism, ought we thus not include ANY belief) but slippery slopes are things resolved by legal canon, and I don't see any particular reason to think that our legal canon has it grossly wrong.

So for instance, it seems correct to rule that athiests could form a group at prison given that this is allowed for religious people. Well, ought we let neonazis also form a group at prison then? I feel our legal canon is sufficiently robust to answer this to the negative. For instance, this particular case delineates some parallels between atheism and religion that are presumably not going to be met by comparing neonazis and religion:

I don't see why you think this. Social identification is still playing a role. For example, labor unions are non-profit organizations that have no issues with political advocacy yet if religious organizations venture too far into political advocacy they run the risk of losing non-profit status. The only difference under your broadened concept of "religion" is the social identification of a church as a religious organization. That is, unless you are actually willing to step into the vagueness of your statement and attempt to begin to characterize your hypothetical alternative.

Or would you allow (under your framework) churches to engage in explicit forms of advocacy in the same manner as labor unions? And would you allow social advocacy "in Jesus' name" (whatever that might mean) the same way you would allow social advocacy for other social organizations and programming?

You seem to be rejecting your earlier statement. The reason for all the quotes in my response is because you said the following:

You have not identified what this alternative is, but under the language presented, and including your concept of theist and atheist perspectives being viewed equally under the law (unlike the current asymmetric situation in which religious perspectives are carved out as being somehow distinct and special). This isn't about what the current legal canon is, but rather this vague thing you have proposed.

I don't buy this. You're engaging in something that's more of a safety argument than a religious protection argument. And if we are working under your framework in which religious protection is not special in any way, you only have a safety argument (which is sufficient to deny neonazi group organization while allowing atheist group organization).

I reject your claim. I don't think it makes any sense at all to use the bolded legal statement as anything useful to your neonazi argument. Indeed, neonazism can and does take on religious/quasireligious characteristics in some of its manifestations. So the distinction you try to present seems far from sufficient. I think you're really making a safety argument and couching in religious terms that don't work (either under the current law and your hypothetical law).

The problem of the framework is the belief that there even is such a thing as a "default position." In a very real way, especially for something like a deep culturally embedded construct that could not reasonably have been avoided within a particular society, the "default position" is a post-hoc intellectual construct.

This is interesting. I expect you're in the minority to claim that religious persons deserve extra rights that non-religious persons don't have access to.