Video transcript:

There is a good chance that you don’t know what atheism actually is, even if you consider yourself to be an atheist. And I am saying this as an atheist myself. While participating in online atheist groups I encounter on a daily basis people who claim to be atheists yet don’t actually know what atheism is. So in this video I am going to clear up the popular misconceptions about atheism that have spread and confused people. 

The first of these misconceptions is about whether or not atheism is a religion, or if it’s just the lack of belief in gods. To answer this question, let’s examine the facts. In many countries, including the USA, atheism is legally classified as a type of religion and as such, atheist non-profit organizations can receive the same legal benefits that other types of religious organizations do. For proof of this one need only look at Supreme Court decisions such as McCreary County, Kentucky. Versus American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky.

Yet, despite this you will frequently hear self-identifying atheist people insist that atheism is not a religion. As an atheist myself, I want to talk about why this discrepancy exists, and how the people identifying themselves as an atheist claiming it cannot be a religion are actually wrong. 

I assign blame for the confusion about whether atheism is a type of religion, to popular atheist organizations and the material they have been publishing about atheism. For example, here is a page from the American Atheist website that I believe contributes to this confusion.

Confusingly, the American Atheists admit they have the same exclusive rights as other religious organizations do, yet they insist that atheism is not a religion. That creates an obvious logical contradiction – how can an atheist organization have the same rights exclusively reserved for religious organizations if atheism isn’t a religion?

Yet, I am going to very simply prove here that American Atheists’ claims are incorrect, and the United States court system has actually got it right, and that atheism actually can indeed be a type of religion. I think the reason groups like American Atheists have it wrong, is because like many atheists in the English speaking world, they just aren’t very familiar with other religions outside of Christianity, which is the dominant form of religion in the English speaking world. So they make broad statements about what a religion is and is not, even though they aren’t particularly well versed in the subject. This unfortunately is a pattern with many atheist organizations, as they have a strong tendency to speak authoritatively about topics the organization leaders actually aren’t very well educated in, but we’ll go down that rabbit hole another time.

For now, let’s start with a definition for what a religion is. This is a subject I am very well educated in, as since I was a child I’ve held an interest in mythology, folk-tales and religions. Several years ago I even published my own Encyclopedia of Legendary Artifacts referencing hundreds of myths and folktales, and one of my unpublished manuscript projects is an encyclopedia of cults both obscure and infamous, and yet another of my projects is an encyclopedia listing religious taboos and superstitions. So, I feel I am pretty well versed in the subject of what religions are and what kinds of religious beliefs humans have adopted over the past several thousand years. If a religion has ever existed, I’ve probably heard about it. 

Now that I have established what my expertise with this subject is – that I am an atheist who has extensively studied religions –  now to ascertain whether atheism can be a religion, we need a definition of what a religion even is. If you were to look yourself for one, you will discover that many English dictionaries often claim that a religion is the belief and/or worship in a deity or some other kind of supernatural thing. This definition is far too narrow however, and not actually representative of what kinds of belief systems are universally recognized as a religion. That is to say, when we look at what kinds of belief systems are defined as religions, this definition that a religion exclusively involves the worship of a deity actually doesn’t fit all things that people call religions. 

For example, Confucianism is a religion that includes a belief in a heavenly guiding force that controls the world, but it does not involve the worship of any specific deity. Likewise, while polytheistic versions of Dow-ism exist with numerous deities, the basic fundamental concepts of Dow-ism are described in works such as the I-Ching, the text of which neither discusses the worship of deities or even mentions any.

There are also forms of Hinduism such as Advaita Vedanta which expressly rejects worshiping deities on the belief that humans are part of the universal truth of the universe, the Brahman, which in layman’s terms to make a crude but accurate comparison to a concept you’re probably familiar with, is something like the Force in the fictional Stars Wars universe. In fact, I’d argue the fictional Jedi religion of Star Wars is another example, as there are people in the real world who have adopted Jedi-ism as a religion.

If you look at the history of humanity, there are also many obscure religions, some might even say cult groups, that have existed in the ancient world, and even in the present day, which have communities, religious rituals and customs, but do not possess deities, These are non-theistic religions, as they do not have gods like theistic religions such as say Christianity and Shintoism do. A historical example is the Cult of Reason, a French state sponsored religion that attempted to replace Christianity in the early part of Revolutionary France in 1793. The Cult of Reason developed a belief system around symbolic rituals to celebrate the use of logic over superstitious beliefs in Christianity.

One recent example of a non-theistic religion is the Creativity Movement, also known as the World Church of the Creator, which is a white supremacist religious group that views specific European ethnic groups to be inherently superior to other human ethnic groups, claiming these ethnic groups to be “nature’s highest creation”. It describes itself as a racial religion, containing lots of rites and beliefs, but does not involve the worship of deities. Its founder even labeled it as an atheist religion for this reason.

I should probably point out here, I don’t endorse any of these religious groups I am mentioning. I am personally a humanist atheist, having developed my own brand of virtue based ethics I call Chivalric Humanism. I am only pointing out, these groups exist and that their existence demonstrates the common dictionary definitions for a religion as involving the worship of a deity might account for many popular religions, but it’s certainly not the only kind of religion people subscribe to. The dictionary definitions therefore are too narrow, as they don’t cover all types of religions. 

The reality is, the word “religion” is a very broad term that covers thousands of different kinds of belief systems. The branch of Sociology that studies religions, sometimes referred to as Comparative Religions or Religious Studies, assigns distinctive labels to different religions in order to better classify them based on what traits each individual religion possesses. 

For example, some religions involve the worship of deities and are labeled as theistic, and some do not and are labeled non-theistic .

In another example, some religions have multiple gods and are labeled polytheistic, and some have only one god and are labeled monotheistic. 

Some religions involve abstaining from indulgences and are labeled ascetic, white other religions promote indulgence and are hedonistic. 

There are other traits we can identify religions by, even if we don’t have convenient well agreed upon definitions for what these traits should be labeled as. For example, some religions such as obscure modern forms of Satanism believe in supernatural forces but do not have readily identifiable deities, as the believers consider Satan to not be a deity that can be worshiped but instead a type of primal supernatural force that exists in humans. I don’t think there are any widely used labels to distinguish this kind of trait in a religion, so I tend to use a blanket term of superstitious religion, which could also apply to any religion that has deities, but also works for religions that have supernatural beliefs in things like cosmic forces and prophecy, but do not necessarily involve worshiping deities. In another example, Dow-ists who only use the I-Ching, or people who are part of the many kinds of Chi Kung energy martial art cults that lack deities, for example, also fall in the category of superstitious religions as well even if they don’t fit nearly into the theistic religion category since they don’t worship a deity as part of the belief system.

So by this point I think, if you’ve been following along, you can plainly see that religious beliefs among humans is a diverse topic. The most popular religions may involve worshiping deities, but not all do. This does not, however, necessarily mean that religions that do not worship deities are automatically atheist. Many non-theistic religions that do not involve the worship of deities do not necessarily prohibit a belief in the existence of deities, and in the case of Dow-ism and Confucianism, you often find their believers often also believe in another religion which might be theistic, such as various ancestral worship folk religions, or Shintoism or other kinds of theistic religions common in Asia. Most of the religions popular during the age of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire were theistic, but not exclusive, meaning people could worship many different deities as part of different, distinct religions cults centered around these deities. For example, during the Roman Empire many Romans were part of the state sanctioned worship of past Roman Emperors as deities, but also belonged to various cults that worshiped a wide range of different folk deities, and even well known ones like Jupiter and Diana. 

The point is, belief in one religion doesn’t necessarily preclude the belief in another religion. It really depends on what the specific beliefs of the religion in question are. There are also branches of a religion, like say Christianity, Dow-ism, Buddhism, Hinduism and even Islam and such. Very popular religions tend to really just be a family of religious beliefs that have very common traits but when each religious community is examined, you can see distinct differences between them, like Protestant Christians compared to Roman Catholic Christians, or Latter Day Saint Christianity, also called Mormonism. Even within these smaller communities of christianity, there are sub-groups. Religions often have a long-tail to them as you start to narrow down the traits within each religious group. 

I want you to consider this, with all of the information I’ve broadly covered, what is the single defining trait of all these different religions that have often contrasting viewpoints on the nature of reality and how people should live and behave? Well, I think I’ve said it already. The defining trait of a religion is not the worshiping of a deity, but instead a belief system of ethics – how to determine what is right and what is wrong – that provides a purpose for a person’s life. 

When you examine every religion that has ever been called such a thing, this is the single defining trait. Providing purpose for someone’s life is what separates something from being a mere ethical code, to being a religion. A business like say Google might have an ethical code written in their employment policies for how employees should behave, but that doesn’t make it a religion, because it’s not telling people the purpose of their life is to work for Google. But a religion expressly is about following an ethical code as part of the purpose of one’s existence – your reason for living. 

This is also why a person may jokingly say their religion is their hobby, in acknowledgement that participation in that hobby is a very important part of their life, providing them with fulfillment. It’s part of the irony, the acknowledgement they have made an amusement they are passionate about into something very important in their life. But the separation between hobby and religion can become muddled at times – and my earlier example of people who claim to be real life Jedi, is a good example of where a hobby starts to become a religion once the person decides to adopt the hobby as the purpose of their life. 

Now let’s go back to atheism and the definition for it that groups such as American Atheists have suggested. They would have you believe atheism is nothing more than a lack of belief in a god, and while that describes part of what atheism is, this description does not exclude atheism from being a religious classification in the same way monotheism and polytheism are. In fact, I’d argue what American Atheists claim as the definition for atheism is incorrect, and what they are actually defining is non-theism. Atheism might be non-theistic, but it is so for a very specific reason that the American Atheist website is not acknowledging.

Generally speaking, when people today use the term ‘atheism’, what they are referring to is a specific kind of belief that emerged from the scientific skepticism movement which developed in the 19th century, almost exclusively in Europe and the United States. I’ll not dwell into the deeper history of the movement, as that is its own rabbit hole, but you can easily get the broad strokes of what the scientific skepticism movement was from an article on Wikipedia or something. 

To summarize, the scientific skepticism movement emerged out of Religious Epistemology debates, most specifically those against Reformed epistemology, these debates primarily taking place in the writings of various European philosophers of the 17th to 18th century that sought to use logic alone to prove or disprove the existence of gods. As Empiricism and modern science developed during the 19th century the focus shifted toward using Empiricism to assess supernatural claims, and this gave rise to the scientific skepticism movement. It is worth pointing out that the scientific skepticism movement wasn’t specifically just aimed at religions – it was just as much directed at pseudosciences like Animal Magnetism and the medical quackery of snake oil salesmen as it was disproving beliefs in leprechauns and Egyptian curses. But the point here is that the modern atheism movement didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. It originated as part of a specific movement championed by specific people who held specific beliefs about the nature of the world. Modern atheism was developed by those who belonged to the scientific skepticism movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. Until this point in time, no one ran around identifying themselves as an atheist. In fact, prior to the scientific skepticism movement the term ‘atheist’ was used exclusively as an insult dating all the way back to the time of ancient Greece. For about two thousand years the word ‘atheist’ meant someone who lacked virtue and was untrustworthy, having the same meaning as ‘godless’ in popular English vernacular. It’s not until this past century when people specifically within the scientific skepticism movement began self-identifying as an Atheist that the meaning of the word to its now most popular meaning shifted. For a few hundred years prior to this, the term ‘secularist’ was most often used to describe a person who did not believe in gods as part of Religious Epistemology debates.

Now let’s examine the scientific skeptics a’bit to better understand modern atheism. The specific belief among those in the scientific skeptics movement that united all of these people together is their shared belief to use the scientific method to debunk the claims of supernatural things made by others. This is literally what they organized themselves to do, and devoted their writings and work – indeed, much of their lives – toward doing. And the goal of this debunking was two-fold: to better educate people about the nature of the world, and to encourage people to stop believing in these superstitious things and instead adopt more accurate viewpoints about the world in the hope that it would lead to better lives for these people, as their decisions will be based on something rational and testable rather than mere assumptions. The modern atheism movement itself then gave birth to the New Atheism movement starting in the early 2000s, New Atheism being a political movement among atheists arguing that superstitious religious beliefs have no value in modern human civilization and that atheists should sharply criticize religious beliefs because they endorse ideas and practices that are damaging to human society. 

So, this is a readily identifiable belief with identifiable behaviors for those who are in the group. However, does that mean the scientific skepticism movement was itself a religion? I would argue it was not, because the movement itself wasn’t giving people any specific moral guidance on how they should live their lives, treat other people or providing a specific explanation for the purpose of their lives.

This brings me to another topic. My biggest criticism of the New Atheist movement, a subject I covered in a previous video essay on this channel, is that while Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen of New Atheism are really great at providing reasons for why you shouldn’t believe in superstitious religions and how to debunk superstitious claims, what the Horsemen aren’t very good at doing is articulating what you should believe instead of these debunked religions. Each of the Horsemen have different alternative religious beliefs they endorse, even if they themselves don’t call these beliefs a religion or expressly have developed a term for these beliefs they hold. 

Take Sam Harris for example, whose beliefs can best be summarized as a type of Utilitarianism that blends between Act and Rule Utilitarianism, mixed with a kind of Scientism where he believes the scientific method can be used to discover moral truths. In addition to this being a recognizable belief system that can be labeled, Harris also disregards that his brand of Scientism is irrational, which it undeniably is because it results in the logical fallacy called the is-ought problem. He creates this fallacy because the scientific method is a system for determining what is real and what is not real, whereas ethics is about how a person should – or ought – to live, behave and even think. It is irrational to try to create an is from an ought, or vice versa, as these are different states – after all, you have no reason to suggest something ought to be a way if it already is that way. The presumption that something should be a certain way is simultaneously an admittance it’s not always that way. So these are different states, descriptive and prescriptive, that Harris often mixes up in his effort to make Science into a method for determining morality.

Harris unfortunately doesn’t seem to have a strong grasp of these philosophical dilemmas as he struggles to find a way to justify his emotional belief that the scientific method is always the best method for investigating anything, even though the method was developed specifically to investigate reality. The scientific method was not developed to investigate people’s opinions about what reality should be. 

Richard Dawkins is another Horseman who tends to waffle around when approached on the subject of what people should believe instead of superstitious religions. My conclusion in listening to his answers when asked about this specific subject during his interviews, is that Dawkins doesn’t really know what system of beliefs people should believe instead of religions like Christianity and Islam. So he tries to hand-wave the subject away by suggesting ethics is something people should choose for themselves, while confusingly also suggesting ethics is something we gain culturally based on a combination of our gene expressions and what kind of behavior is necessary for a civilized community to be orderly. He is strongly of the opinion that the ethics of a community inform the ethics of religions, and not the other way around. There are lots of flaws with this proposition, such as that some specific individual has to originate the ethical idea the community adopts in the first place, as well as the readily observable behavior in fringe cult groups who are able to easily convince people to shift their beliefs rather dramatically away from what the majority of the rest of society finds to be acceptable moral behavior, which plainly shows that people adopt new moral beliefs for reasons that are more complicated than just because the idea is popular. More importantly, Dawkins has identified himself as “culturally Christian” and I view this as his acknowledgement that Dawkins doesn’t really have a well structured alternative to Christianity – he likes a lot of the moral beliefs and virtues of that religion, and still abides by them for reasons unrelated to their superstitious justifications. This, too, is a kind of religious belief – this “culturally Christian but atheist” point of view is a religion, even if it’s just a personal one to Dawkins himself.

This is an important thing to understand: A religious belief does not need to be logical, or coherent. In fact, almost no religion is rational. Almost every religion I have ever studied contradicts its own claims in some key way, and I think the reason for why is very easy to understand: religions are almost never the result of someone earnestly trying to discover the truth of the world or to figure out the absolute best way to live. Instead, religions are nearly always developed as a means to control other people through dictating their behavior, and religions are nearly always adopted by followers in order to join the resulting community of other believers of that religion. People look past all of the obvious contradictions and inherent craziness of most religions not because they don’t see them, but because it doesn’t prevent them from belonging to the community of other people who share that religion, which is the actual reason people join religions. They are looking for kinship, solidarity, and purpose in life. And the leaders of a religious movement provide that to their followers as their own purpose. The only reason that religions have ethical codes is because religions built around communities need ethical codes for how people treat others in that community. A religion doesn’t really need rituals, or even ethical codes. All it really needs to achieve is to provide a person with the feeling of having purpose for their life. And everyone has that, even those who are atheists. Whether a person has created a label for what that purpose is defined as, doesn’t matter, as labels are only needed to describe a thing to someone else. If the life purpose you believe in is very personal to you, such as in the case of personal religions, you don’t necessarily need to be able to define it to other people. 

To further illustrate my point, let me show you something. Here are some photos and clips of sculptures made out of tinfoil and various found junk, by James Hampton, which he produced over a period of about 14 years, who believed himself to be building a throne room for the second coming of Jesus Christ. The sculptures are intricate, well decorated, covered in symbolism of his beliefs. Hampton believed he was receiving divine prophecies and visions, and wrote them down in a notebook he titled the Book of the 7 Dispensation. He created his own denomination of Christianity, distinct with its own rituals and unique beliefs, and as far as we know, never told anyone about it nor attempted to recruit anyone else into it. 

So let me be clear in my definition of what a religion is: A religion does not need a community to be a religion. It only needs to provide a person with a purpose for their life, even if that purpose is just creating tinfoil sculptures intended to be seen by no one else but their imagined god.  

A religion is a set of beliefs a person has about the purpose of their life. That’s what it is when we strip away all other attributes from every religion to find what all religions have in common. It’s not about what kind of community, or what kind of ethics, or anything else. Religion is primarily the beliefs a person has about the purpose of their life. As such, what can be a religion is very broad. This is also why we’ve been witnessing in modern times people adopt political ideologies with the same kind of passionate, irrational zeal that people adopt superstitious religions with – it’s because these political ideologies serve the same role in a person’s life, they provide them with a purpose for living. The borderline between what is religion, and what is political belief, is rather thin for these people.I don’t think it is at all a coincidence that so many people involved in the political LGBTQ movement who find themselves ostracized from mainstream religions like Christianity often identify as an atheist but then passionately adopt Progressive liberal or Marxist ideologies related to their sexual orientation with the kind of fanatical zeal you see in people who are part of popular religions. It’s very obviously the result of, lacking the mainstream religious community of Christianity, they adopt the political beliefs as their religion and find kinship with others of like mind. 

That gets us back to atheism as a religion. Atheism isn’t a specific religion, with specific well defined codes of ethics or even a purpose for a life. Yet Atheism can be a type of religion, and when it is, it is a religion defined by the belief there are no gods specifically because there is no scientific evidence for these gods. This last part is crucial – atheism isn’t just non-theism, but non-theism specifically because there is no scientific evidence to prove the existence of gods. This is because atheism is part of the scientific skepticism movement. You really cannot separate atheism from that movement, as all of the talking points atheists use to disprove the existence of gods are from the scientific skepticism movement. So adopting these arguments makes the beliefs for why there are no gods part of the scientific skepticism movements’ philosophy. 

Now I recognize that atheism is frequently claimed by many people to be defined by a lack of belief in gods and therefore cannot be a religion, but that is just a semantical argument. The strongly held belief there are no gods is itself a stated belief about the nature of the world. But that in itself is not a purpose for a person existing, anymore than polytheism or monotheism as labels are.

Atheism cannot be a theistic religion. Instead, atheism is a type of non-theistic religion where the person does not believe in the existence of supernatural things because of their shared beliefs with the scientific skepticism movement. I would argue the atheist religion also needs to have scientific skepticism movement attributes, since that is what atheism came out of: scientific skepticism debunking superstitious claims and encouraging people to use reason and logic instead to navigate life. No matter how you slice it, telling someone not to believe superstitions is still telling people to believe something. Especially when you are super passionate in the belief that others should not have that belief, becoming anti-theist. 

I think people understanding this definition for atheism is key for clearing up misunderstandings of what atheism is, which is important because there are many groups out there trying to co-opt the atheism movement and its label for their own purposes that aren’t aligned with what the scientific skepticism movement is about. For example, circling back to the Creativity Movement of white supremacists I mentioned earlier in this video, they claim to be an atheist religion yet believe pseudo-scientific things about human genetics and racial superiority. So while they might be a non-theistic religion that doesn’t worship gods, and while they may claim to be atheist, because they are not actually part of the scientific skepticism movement I do not think they can rightly be called an atheist religion. On that same notion, the many self-identifying atheists out there who have adopted pseudo-scientific beliefs about gender identity, those who disregard the biological realities between men and women in favor of the Intersectionality / Wokeism narratives that reject well researched science surrounding human sexual dimorphism, I do not think they are genuine atheists either. For the obvious reason that atheism is part of the scientific skepticism movement, and if you’re rejecting science in favor of pseudo-academics belief systems like Intersectionality that explicitly reject modern science then you cannot rightly be part of the scientific skepticism movement. Unfortunately at present as I write this video script, many popular atheist organizations such as American Atheists and Humanists International have been hijacked by these pseudo-atheists who adopt all of the scientific skepticism arguments against superstitious religious claims, but don’t apply any of these principles to the examination of their own political beliefs. I hope that through the publication of this video I get a few of these people to re-assess themselves and recognize they have drifted away from genuine atheism through their rejection of science by the adoption of Wokeism, and that these organization may someday return to genuine atheism promotion once again.

Now, having said everything, I don’t necessarily think that it is required for an atheist religion to encourage the believer to debunk superstitious claims as the meaning of their life, although I do think there definitely is that type of atheistic religious belief among a lot of people who identify as atheist. This is because they can easily be observed spending tremendous amounts of time on the internet doing little else but discussing how wrong superstitious religions are, and finding kinship among other atheists in doing so, finding meaning and purpose in that debunking. So they have turned this debunking into their personal religion, as it has become a purpose for their lives. 

However, I also identify as an atheist, and I consider my Chivalric Humanism to fall under the category of atheism as religion. This is because my Chivalric Humanism is part of the scientific skepticism movement, as Chivalric humanism encourages people to use logic and science to investigate the world and help inform decision making and reject superstitious beliefs. But in Chivalric Humanism the purpose for life isn’t to do this debunking but instead to contribute to the survival of the human species. That is to say, to be a good person, to contribute to the betterment of society to maximize the survival of the species. And I think that is a more useful purpose to one’s life than just complaining about other people in another group all day long. 

I developed Chivalric Humanism as a personal moral code for myself and then I decided it can be useful for other atheists struggling to leave Christianity. It doesn’t require a leader, anyone can adopt it and anyone can teach it. So it’s also a leaderless religion lacking any structured hierarchy. 

So, why did I publish my book of my personal atheist religion? I recognized that most people, especially among a community as niche as atheists, aren’t going to spend  a lot of time trying to create a well defined religious belief alternative to superstitious religions. Very few people have ever tried to do such a thing. Off the top of my head, the list of attempts to do so are few, including just myself, the Ethical Culture movement, the Cult of Reason during Revolutionary France, and Auguste Comte’s religion of Humanity. So it is a very obscure topic most people are not at all familiar with, and few have had much interest in. Nevertheless, when you lay things out in an organized way and examine the topic logically, it is clear that atheism can indeed be a religion, which is why the US court system has it right, and why groups like American Atheists have it wrong. Atheism isn’t the absence of belief in gods. Rather, it is the belief that supernatural things do not exist because they cannot be demonstrated to exist using logic and science. And a religion becomes atheist when the purpose of someone’s life incorporates that idea as part of the beliefs. It doesn’t need to be expressly the sole purpose of their life, it just has to be part of the collection of beliefs adopted by the person that contributes to their understanding of what that purpose is.

In closing, it is unfortunate that the atheist label seems to be getting more and more adopted by people that don’t actually know what atheism is. The meaning of the term is being diluted to simply being lack of belief in gods, and its development as part of the scientific skepticism movement is being forgotten. Yet, Atheism isn’t just non-theism. It’s a very specific movement with a very specific origin that has very specific beliefs for why people don’t believe in Gods. It’s not in itself a religion but it can be a classification of a religion if that religion incorporates the scientific skepticism beliefs for why gods don’t exist. 

I hope you got something out of this video essay.