My spin is to say that freedom of religion is for believers, freedom from religion is for skeptics. Atheists fall under the heading of skeptics.

Reminds me of the old Will Rogers quote. "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
I am not a member of any religious organization. I am an atheist.

posted before. That atheism is a religion is like saying that off is a TV station.

Well, AMEN to all that.

Leftism is a secular religion embraced by too many "free-thinking" atheists.

So, you are saying, I don’t need to pay money to the atheist priest down the road? Won’t he be surprised!

But atheism is also not taxed.

Atheism doesn’t qualify as a religion in my judgment, but it’s not so clear as some might think. For starters there is no scholarly (or otherwise) consensus on precisely what constitutes a religion. And there is quite a wide spectrum of concepts and behaviors that fall under the heading of “atheism”.

I know, every atheist is certain s/he knows the one and only final perfect definition of atheism... and they all differ.

But some atheists do relate to their atheism in ways that are similar to how some theists relate to their theism. So an argument could be made that there is some overlap.

One of the functions of religion is to give people a worldview or cosmology from which to orient their life, and to some extent, atheism (and its usual attendant confidence in science) can serve that purpose.

Religions also give people a source of social cohesion, and such cohesion is clearly facilitated by sites like this one and many other atheism-oriented organizations.

And nowhere near last or least, atheism can be, and often is, taken up as an identity, with every bit as much fervor as any religious person might display, and with at least as much closed-mindedness.

So I don’t think the distinction is as clear as some would like to think.

What atheism doesn’t do is provide a coordinated, systematic practice that helps the individual and the species balance the demands of civilization against his/her/its evolved instinctual impulses. So in this most important way, atheism doesn’t rise to a fuller, biological, anthropological, scientific measure of religion.

When I was a Christian I lumped atheists in with the devil worshipping crowd. I believe that’s how most Christians do. Now I look at atheists as reasonable and rational people that just follow the evidence and actually know more about the Bible than 99.9% of Christians. It’s through this knowledge they made the decision to be atheists

Not believing in ( as opposed to being agnostic about) fairy stories from the Bronze Age can never be considered a religion. Only foolish religious people make this false equivalent.

Most importantly, we don't fund a leader's 70 million dollar estate through tithe. We also don't pay the legal fees for the child rape litigations.