My wife received a letter from her uncle TM, pastor of a church in rural VA, that I wanted to share an excerpt from, and a piece of my response to. He said (in part):
It is a good thing to question our faith, because if we can’t question our faith and still believe, then we have no faith in the first place. But while we are questioning, we need to examine how deep and powerful or how shallow our Christian experience was. And every true intellectual I knew at Berea and at Virginia Tech went through a questioning phase in their faith. I went to a great number of meetings and seminars lead by atheists and agnostics at Berea and Virginia Tech, because I wanted to hear their thinking and read what they were reading. I hope that [nsfl] reads more and more and explores the entire realm of intellectual thought on atheism while he is still forming his theories. Because, honestly, he has not had enough time to process enough information to totally change his mind yet, unless he is a person who leaps from one faith to another throughout his life on emotion. And, ironically, this is one of the criticisms that atheists use against Christians—that we base our faith on emotionalism Atheism is a faith, and atheists are believers, according to the Supreme Court.
Eddie Tabash has a
great paper summarizing the legal interpretations of the Establishment Clause. I wrote him back and said (in part):
I thought one of your points below worth responding to at length regarding "atheism is a religion". This largely depends on your choice of definition for "religion". There are many different dictionary definitions, and some of them would indeed include atheism, where religion is defined as "a set of beliefs" or something similar. But many definitions include some mention of the supernatural and/or a deity, which obviously excludes atheism as a religion.
I found an excellent review of this complex issue in a Harvard law journal on human rights:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss16/gunn.shtml
The Supreme Court (and other courts) have taken the position that atheism should be legally protected as a religious freedom -- i.e. the freedom of not practicing religion at all. And so they have had to confer religious protections to people whose religious freedoms were violated.
A long time ago in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), the Court made a footnote in which secular humanism was given religious status in order to protect a nonbeliever from being given a religious test for office:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torcaso_v._Watkins
Much more recently (2004), the Court clarified issues surrounding the freedom of the states to provide funds to further religious education in Locke v. Davey. A student received a state scholarship, but was not allowed to use the money to attend a religious school to become a minister. They had two conflicting issues -- the freedom of religion in which things like "religious persecution" are protected, versus the issue of church-state separation in which the government cannot give aid to one religion at the exclusion of others. They had to weigh the definitions of "religion" as whether getting a theology degree was a religious pursuit, and if so, whether his right to religious non-discrimination was being violated by withholding the scholarship.
http://atheism.about.com/library/decisions/fund/bldec_LockeDavey.htm
http://www.restorethepledge.com/FACTS/sermons/sermon004.html
In the latest high-profile case (2005), Kaufman v. McCaughtry, a Wisconsin prisoner was denied the right to form a study group composed of nonbelievers, because prison officials declared that only religious groups could form such groups, and that the prisoners were nonreligious. The case was complex (as they usually are), but the federal appeals court (7th) decided that the prisoners were being religiously discriminated against, even though they were explicitly nonreligious.
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/195836.htm
http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/court36.htm
http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/361FFJUD.pdf
I think the best way to summarize it is this: in issues concerning individual liberty, the courts have ruled that atheists are protected from religiously-affiliated discrimination and religious faith tests for public office -- they use the sort of definition like "a set of beliefs about human existence, values, etc." so that they can protect *all* individuals from these issues.
In issues concerning church-state entanglement, the courts use a stricter definition -- religion in that sense must have some element of the supernatural or a deity in order to fail the Lemon Test. So while atheism is undeniably a set of beliefs *about* God and gods in general, it is (obviously) the antithesis of faith in those entities, and is thus not a religion under definitions which include an element of the supernatural, which is almost *every* definition of religion:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=define:religion
I would conclude by saying that atheism : religious faith :: bald : hair. Baldness is a state pertaining to and concerning hair (the absence thereof), just as atheism is a state pertaining to and concerning religious faith (the absence thereof). It means one lacks faith in a deity, not that one, "has faith that no deity exists."
I'm sure others could go on for days with this somewhat-complex topic on the intersection of law and atheists' 1st Amendment protections, but I thought the simple excerpt one worth sharing.
