Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

It sometimes happens that, in the philosophical no-man's-land that is my everyday conversation, someone will make a comment that really grinds my gears. It starts off small: my immediate reaction is usually a quiet acknowledgement and, depending on how receptive to reason the offending party is, perhaps I'll offer a response hinting at how terribly wrong they are. The conversation continues, the gear-grinder forgotten for the moment. The thing that brings it looming back into my consciousness hours, days, weeks, months or years later is the haunting notion that I have left a grave wrong uncorrected. Thus, these vastly irritating comments could be considered a kind of delayed Berserk Button for me.

Case in point: one of my dearest friends made an offhand comment some months ago to the effect that "atheism is in itself a religion". At the time, I settled for a retort along the lines of "no, it's not, that doesn't make a lick of sense", but it has come back to annoy me ever since nonetheless. It troubles me more than is strictly reasonable that such an intelligent, intuitive and sensible young woman could accept for an instant the ridiculous notion that a term that denotes nothing more and nothing less than 'absence of belief in a deity' refers to a religion.

I suppose the strength of my objection stems from a deep-seated contempt for religion as a concept: I am deeply fascinated by mythology from around the world, and religion has never managed to strike me as anything other than mythology taken far too seriously. There are few demonstrations of utter stupidity grander than the argument that atheism is merely a different brand of religion, due largely to the fact that atheism is in essence the absence of religion. Can you imagine a cancer patient trying to argue that perfect health is just a different type of illness? 

Of course there is also the fact that entirely aside from the obvious fallacy, the other half of the argument - "atheists are a united group of people who all have the same belief system" - is simply untrue. I'm absolutely bewildered as to where people come up with this idea, because I've certainly never seen any evidence of it. Atheists present no united front; even atheists who choose to band together in small, localized groups of similar-mindedness are no more a religious organisation than middle-aged women in a book club are founders of a "Love Books Religion". Atheists, being grouped together on no other basis than one particular, very specific thing they do not believe, cannot collectively agree on anything other than that one single thing. Morality, politics, whether or not Jesus existed, we can't even decide what to call ourselves. If atheism is a religion where are its leaders? There are certainly people of note in the atheist community, and some who are much louder voices of reason than others, but we can't collectively agree on who our intellectual heroes are. Some of us are spectacularly uninformed - atheism does not in any case guarantee logic or intelligence.

We are ordinary people of every race, gender, shape, and social status, and we have only one thing in common: a lack of faith. More often than not this means that we are capable and more than willing to think for ourselves, and make our decisions based on fact and reason. This method of thought is fundamentally incompatible with faith. Faith is the mechanism which allows theists and/or stubborn, petulant people to refuse point-blank to allow the possibility that they could be wrong. It is also the basis of every religion ever invented. And it is this fundamental discrepancy that irritates me to this day. I still wonder what kind of incredible mental acrobatics you must have to perform in order to convince yourself that faithless = belonging to organisation of faith.