RE: Being an Atheist in a Christian Dominated Country
However, I feel that if you examine Atheism closely, you will likely find that it too fits all the necessary criteria to be regarded as a religion.
You might feel that way, but that's only because you haven't bothered to actually examine it.
Let me help you with that. Let's start with the definition:
Atheism - the lack of belief in a deity or deities
When somebody is an atheist, this doesn't tell you anything about the rest of their positions, beliefs or their morality. Atheism is not a set of values or even a world view - it's just a way to call the group of people that answer the question Do you believe in a deity or deities?" with No. How does that make that widely diverse group of people a religion? It's like saying that everybody that is not Christian is the same religion - non-Christian...
Distrust for religion should not equate to disbelief in God.
It doesn't. Disbelief in the existence of a deity or deities for most people stems from the lack of evidence for their existence. Diamonds are something real and demonstrable, not believing in god is like not believing in unicorns as nobody can demonstrate convincingly that they exists. It's the same with god. Until you can prove that a deity of sort exists, it's totally reasonable to not believe that it does.
This is awfully presumptuous of you. I don't know how you can feel that you know me well enough to make such a statement about my experience. I have most certainly examined Atheism very closely, which resulted in me no longer referring to myself as one.
It easy to cite a definition and then act as though that proves something, but it doesn't. An examination should demand one look further than the given definition of any particular word.
I don't have much time but I will try to share my reasoning for the claim as clearly as I can.
I am going to be talking in a general sense, referring to the average person who grows up and churned through a public education system.
As you grow up, you are presented with only two serious theories for where we came from. Creationism, or The Big Bang Theory and Evolution. Through the use of multiple choice questions and "red vs blue" paradigms rampant throughout society, your brain is conditioned to accept beliefs based on the rejection of opposing(and typically limited) choices.
So when one later rejects God and creationism, they subconsciously and automatically invest their belief in the only other viable option that had been presented to them throughout their lifetime- The Big Bang Theory. This results in the lack of the necessity to examine their new belief in the Big Bang Theory with the same level off scrutiny and scepticism.
This is dangerous, because one then invests their faith in the claims of mainstream science by-proxy. This is why almost every, if not every Atheist you meet believes in the big bang theory and evolution as the cause for our existence. Typically, they also dogmatically believe any and all information presented to them under the guise of "scientific research" and thus, they are placing their faith in something they cannot prove for themselves, just like followers of religion.
If you truly spend some time studying evolutionary theory and the big bang theory, and if you do so from an unbiased and open-minded perspective, I believe you will come to the realisation that the claims are just as fanciful as that of most religions.
I suspect you will argue that this is not the journey of all Atheists, and you would be correct. But, it is certainly the journey for a lot of them, myself included. And it is only because of how closely I did examine Atheism and what led me to adopt it as a philosophy, that I was able to put all this together and then come to my own decision for once.
I think you are perhaps just being combative. The analogy was a good one and I see no reason to have to explain it. Also, you could not demonstrate that diamonds, as they are described to us, exist. They are precious because they take however many centuries or millennia to be created.. Can you prove this? No, you can find a scientist to prove it for you with words that they learned from another scientist. That's not proof, unless you have faith in the source of the information. To be clear, I don't believe that diamonds are not a real thing, but my point is that I believe I'd be an idiot to believe 100% that they are what they are reported to be without seeing the transformation from rock to precious stone take place before my very eyes.