The point he is making is Religion is replaced by Ideology. lets not reduce ourselves to "word-play".

Atheism is not an ideology any more than your lack of belief in invisible pink unicorns is. It is the simple absence of belief.

Some atheists do have ideologies that are related to their atheism, many others do not.

Agnostic is not an ideology, not caring whether there is a god or not is not an ideology.

Certainty of non-existence of God is Ideology.

> Certainty of non-existence of God is Ideology.

Maybe, but that's not what atheism means to most atheists.

Atheism is not believing in God(s). This is different from both saying "I don't know", like agnostics do and actively denying the possibility of existence in God.

Most of us, when we say "I don't believe in X" are not saying "I have absolute certainty that X does not exist". We're saying "I've not seen any reason to believe in X, so I don't". I'm not agnostic about the existence of Santa Claus - I don't believe in Santa Claus. But maybe there really is some guy living in some secret compound on the North Pole -- it is however so exceedingly unlikely that I'm not going to go around answering "I don't know" if someone ask.

Most atheists are "soft atheists" who fall in the category above, who if asked will say "God does not exist," but who if pushed will concede that just like I can't know for absolute certain that Russell's infamous teapot or Santa Claus doesn't exist, I can't absolutely rule out the existence of every conceivable definition of a God.

And this is not an ideology any more than the non-existence of Santa Claus is.

There are also "hard" atheists that insists that God 100% certainly does not, or can not, exist, and in those instances you might be right to call it an ideology. But they're a fringe - personally despite growing up among atheists I've never met one in person.

No the point GP is making is that atheism is a religion (it's not), which is in itself wordplay.

To try to stay on the subject of the article, I find it interesting that it's Protestants who are abandoning their faith which is most of the downward trend in the graphs presented. I find that makes sense as Protestants are generally less dogmatic and more questioning (at least historically they were from my understanding) than their Catholic brethren.

Another way to put it, I feel there are some structural differences between Protestants and Catholics which help to explain the downward trend in one, and less so in the other.

edits: bad grammar

Catholicism is a culturally "thicker" religion, which I suspect is responsible for the trend of lapsed Catholics continuing to describe themselves as Catholic in opinion polls even when effectively Nones. If you operationalized the definition, say by asking "have you been to church in the past week?" you'd probably see more similar trends.

"a-theism literally means "lack of belief""

This is nonsense, of course. It shows a definite predilection among atheists to deceive themselves and others. Atheism is definitely a belief. But go ahead and believe otherwise, if you know what I mean.

"Everyone is just deceiving themselves and everyone else" is not a logical position to stand on.

I'll also point out this is a novelty account with negative karma.

It is a hair style.

Uh no it's a lack thereof.

I am sure you can have hair and still be considered bald.

No, it's a complete lack of hair.

Nudity is not a set of clothing.

See my other reply too, but let me ask : would you call Steve Ballmer bald or not?

I'd call him mostly bald.

He's welcome to style what hair he has left.

I love word arguments. The empty set is still a set.

Nudity is wearing the empty set of clothing.