I can offer two answers to the question “Is atheism is a religion?”
- That depends on how you define “religion”.
- No
That depends on how you define religion
Religions have historically been associated with the belief in a god or gods. But there is a political movement to label atheism as a religion so that it will experience the same restrictions placed on the religions by the US Constitution.
This effort is trying to blur the lines between atheism and religions by means of “adjusting” the definition of religion to include atheism. This article “Is Atheism A Religion?” is an excellent example of this argument on a Christian website. If you scroll down to the bottom of the article and watch the video near the end it states this purpose explicitly. https://creation.com/atheism-a-religion
Another reason atheism is commonly mistaken for a religion because it is often listed as an option with the major religions on many forms that ask one to self identify their religious preference. It is usually labeled as none, as in “none of the above”.
No, atheism is not a religion
No one has ever suggests that “theism” is a religion. So why would anyone suggest that “(a)theism” is a religion?
- Theism has one and only one belief: that a god or gods exist.
- (A)theism has one and only one belief: that a god or gods do not exist.
The ultimate source of authority is the overriding and distinguishing difference between theism and atheism. Theists believe that a god or gods are the ultimate source of authority. Atheists believe that man is the ultimate source of authority.
Theists, as a group, believe in numerous radically different and often times mutually exclusive gods. Each of these gods has (or had) a group of followers who study the god to know what it wants and how to appease it to get a reward and to avoid its wrath (punishment). In the case of the gods with the largest followings, their believers/followers created user manuals in the form of sacred texts (Bible, Torah, Koran). The other smaller groups of believers/followers depend on oral history passed down from generation to generation.
These different theistic based groups of believers/followers have typically been referred to as religions.
There are some 4,300 religions of the world. This is according to Adherents, an independent, non-religiously affiliated organisation that monitors the number and size of the world’s religions.
https://www.theregister.com/2006/10/06/the_odd_body_religion
Each of these 4300 theistic world views (religions) depend on the authority of their unique god or gods. This large variety of gods, each with their different expectations and rules for their believers/followers, is why there is so much variety in the religions of the world.
But atheism has only one source of authority: Man. Therefore atheistic world views are much more homogeneous, more similar to each other, than the religions are to each other.
Religious believers/followers see this homogeneity and mistakenly believe that all atheistic world views are the same. Therefore they consider atheistic world views to be a single world view and label it atheism.
But (a)theism, like theism, only consists of a single belief. Atheism, like theism, is neither a world view nor is it a religion.