Bulllllshiiiit. You might have said one thing in the first line, but you ended up saying quite another for the entire rest of the paragraph.
Lepton? My first thought is to take it in context and be insulted somehow, but I can't for the world of me figure out what you were trying to call me. The dictionary definition appears to say many things about leptons, but none that could be applied to a person.
My statement about atheism often being a "religion of one" is perfectly fucking valid.
Now, there's a joke out there that I rather like that illustrates my point pretty nicely. You know how you call a group of sheep a flock, and a group of crows a murder, etc? You know what you'd call a group of atheists?
An argument.
There are no sets of agreed upon principles or traditions among atheists, no system of attitudes or beliefs, and CERTAINLY no institutions of ANY sort. Organizing atheiststo do anything, let alone form a coherent religion, is an exercise in futility.
This is MUCH different than applying that same argument to hinduism. Yeah, there are a bazillion and one variations, but they're all ultimately variations on the same belief system, and are all organized institutions, with predefined sets of attitudes, beliefs, and practises that all members adhere to. Its a large number of very tiny religions, but it's a hell of a stretch to say the unique beliefs of a single person constitutes a "religion".
Ultimately, it comes to that same thing I told KFC. You're playing at a word game, and defining the term "religion" far more broadly than it's used in common discourse and in doing so devalue the word until it doesn't mean anything. Seriously, "a personal set of attitudes, beliefs, and practises"? When you define "religion" like that it ceases to have meaning, since EVERYONE then has their own religion. The distinction then becomes completely useless.
Yeah, it's in Webster, but Webster covers all the bases, and that isn't the usage that the word "religion" usually recieves in regular discourse, meaning that when applied to atheistic philosophies it's carrying rhetorical baggage that no longer applies with such a broad definition.
Now am I saying that athiesm is mutually exclusive with religion? Fuck no, that's what I was just giving Alderic a hard time about.
Now, while I'm being a nitpicky, pedantic, ranting twit, communism is ALWAYS an atheistic ideology (at least if it's based of Marx's teachings), and Islam cannot "be a Theocracy", a theocracy is a system of government that puts clergy in charge, not a religion. You can have Islamic theocracies, but Islam itself is not the theocracy, it's merely the basis for it. Also, as I understand it, Jews are a special case in that the same word refers to both ancestry and religion (please correct me if I'm wrong, Leauki).
