@Nullo
Yeah, you would think that. But you’d be wrong. Atheism means not being something else.
That’s not an important point, or even really relevant, but it’s true by definition, and insisting on the contrary is somewhat silly.
The people you’re trying to oppose aren’t characterised entirely by their being atheists, because there can be and are atheists who aren’t like them. I suggest you pick out a different shared feature to refer to them by, one that more directly represents what bothers you about them.
Okay, let’s disregard the semantic non-issue for a moment.
Does the world view of a lot of atheists, me included, have things in common with religions? Maybe. All right, probably, if you’re general enough about it. Any world view would, by virtue of being a world view.
But what’s wrong with religion – which is the relevant thing – is not that it has priests, doctrines, organisations and moral beliefs. What’s wrong with religion is a feature that notably isn’t shared by atheist philosophy: staggering overestimation of the reliability of beliefs with no objective foundation.
That difference renders the question whether atheism “is a religion” irrelevant and meaningless. If, by some semantic cleverness, you can define atheism as a religion, then it’s the one religion that doesn’t have the flaws that make being religion a bad thing.
Besides: are you sure you want to consider what atheists believe a religion? Do you want yours to have to compete with that? The most miraculous thing your priests can do is chant Latin at a wafer and then tell people it’s become sacred now. Our priests banished smallpox from the world and our miracles carry men to the god damned moon. Our doctrines are told by the world itself, writ into the very universe in the arcane language of causality.
It’s obvious that ours is the one true religion.