John Figgs wrote:These questions would fit neatly for any religion, all one has to do is replace atheist/agnostic with muslim, christian, any other religion or sect on the planet.
Well, that certainly seems to be the conclusion you already had, which you hoped to justify.
Had you actually had an open mind and been prepared to see atheism as not necessarily more than a lack of belief, quite clearly the answers to the questions would have been expected to be:
Question 1) - A range of answers, from people who married believers to people seeing it as a potential or likely issue, in some cases on tha basis of bad experiences with believers intolerant of non-belief.
(Had you asked a non-football fan whether they would want to spend their life with a serious football fan, you might expect similar kinds of answers, even from people who weren't anti-football, but who simply didn't want their life significantly revolving around it.)
Question 2) - One might expect many answers to be that it wasn't a defining trait, and that it surfaced largely in response to outside forces. Which is what you got.
(With the non-football-fan analogy, the typical non-fan isn't likely to think about football from one week to the next, unless someone pushes them to, or they see a story on the news about footballers or football supporters acting like twats.
However, in an environment where they were repeatedly pushed to think about it or comment on it (like working in an office full of football fanatics( they could easily get a reputation as being
anti-football as a result of simply failing to be a fan or to care about it.)
Of course, to skew things hugely in favour of your desired conclusion, you were bringing up atheism as a topic in the first place, in a specific forum which is far from a random sample of atheists, in a subforum of that forum talking about about atheism.
Nevertheless,
even then, you got a lot of people saying it wasn't a defining trait as far as they were concerned.
Try going onto a irrationalcredulism forum and asking questions of Muslims in an Islam section, about how much
they think their belief is a defining characteristic of them.
Question 3) One might expect a range of answers, depending on people's individual temperament and personal histories. Which is what you got.
Personally, for me, the extent to which I would hold my tongue about my atheism is all about my own personal tensions between honesty and politeness in particular situations, and my social responses.
If anything, my approach to that is probably a mix of innate personality and my upbringing by parents who weren't atheists, but whose teaching and examples related to morality were based on humanity rather than religion, for which I hugely respect them.
John Figgs wrote: This leads me to conclude that for most atheism is more than simply ''lack of belief'' its actually some sort of anti religion of some sort. Its kinda funny actually.
It seems likely that what leads you to conclude that is a strong predisposition to conclude it.
It would be
deeply retarded to ask some questions, consider if the answers can be fitted to a pre-existing conclusion and leave it at that.
To be rationally skeptical, one should honestly ask whether the answers are consistent with different conclusions. In doing so, one should bear in mind where the questions were asked.
As it is, you asked questions in a place likely to
maximise the number of 'militant atheist' responses and you still got a cross-section of replies including many which don't fit the conclusions you seemingly want to justify.
I don't think Sherlock Holmes is quoted as saying said "
Once one has found that vague evidence roughly fits with a preexisting conclusion, it's perfectly fine to just switch off one's mind, declare the case closed, and fuck off down the pub."
Personally, the great majority of my friends are atheists, not for any reasons of selectivity but simply due to the very small number of believers among people who share my social interests and/or my educational background. Unless prompted by some story of religion on the news, neither religion nor atheism come up
at all often as topics of conversation.
I had a month on a mountain this summer with a group of students and some other old reprobates like me, all of whom (as far as I know) are non-believers. We were nicely insulated by distance from news reports of everyday stupidity, and despite the fact that there's a huge amount of time between the serious activities for talking about everything and anything, I really can't remember religion coming up as a topic meaningfully frequently, if it came up at all. I'm quite sure we spent vastly less time talking about it than talking about the state of the shit-pit.
But then maybe that's
your experience of religious people in general - that
they can go from one week or month to the next without particularly thinking of religion or letting it affect their daily life.
But if so, you should remember, not
everyone is lucky enough to be CofE.
I don't do sarcasm smileys, but someone as bright as you has probably figured that out already.
by 
