I came across an older opinion piece by Graham Lawton (Executive Editor of 'New Scientist') and published in his excellent periodical publication, on the 15 April 2017. While not wishing to breach copyright, I trust that Graham won't mind his opinion reproduced here - his views will find many an empathetic reader relate to his viewpoints (and some will not).

My alternate title for Graham's opinion piece is "The status and struggles of Atheists in the modern world".

I strongly suggest that anyone with a yearning to learn about other's ideas on religion, belief and atheism, etc subscribe to this fantastic publication. Select articles are also available free on line. Check out: [newscientist.com]

Graham's piece entitled "Unholy faith?" follows - it has some very interesting propositions and arguments that may spark some worthwhile discussion in our group:-

I RECENTLY discovered that I am a member of a downtrodden minority, one of the most mistrusted and discriminated-against in the world. As a white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gender male, this is not something I'm used to. But my minority status is undeniable. I am an atheist. I'm not complaining. I live in one of the world's most secular countries and work for a science magazine, so it hasn't got in the way. But for atheists living in societies with a strong religious tradition, discrimination is a real problem. In the US, atheists have one of the lowest approval ratings of any social group. Non-believers are the only significant minority considered unelectable as president- and "unelectable" turns out to be a pretty low bar.

Even when atheists don't face open hostility or discrimination, we often have to endure put-downs about the sincerity of our (lack of) beliefs. One of the most common is that "atheism is just another religion anyway".
There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of god, the argument goes, so to deny it is a leap of faith. Ergo, atheism is just like a religion. "This idea turns up all the time, and it is very loaded," says Lois Lee, who directs the Non-religion and Secularity Research Network at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. "When people say atheism is ‘just another religion', they normally mean it in a pejorative way."

The subtext is clear: atheists are hypocrites.
But this is more than a personal slight.
If atheism really is just another religion, its claim to be a superior way to run the world is fatally weakened. All the criticisms it flings at religion - of being irrational, dogmatic and intolerant - come flying back with interest, and progress towards a more rational and secular society is undermined.
So is it true? Is atheism just another religion?

Atheists have been treated with suspicion for centuries. In 1689, philosopher john Locke warned that they are "not at all to be tolerated". The "just another religion" claim seems to have arisen around a decade ago in response to the rise of New Atheism, a scientifically motivated critique of religion led by Richard Dawkins and underpinned by his 2006 book The God Delusion.

Journalists writing about the movement took to using religious metaphors, calling it "the church of the non-believers" and a "crusade against god".

Religious scholars joined the fray to defend their beliefs. Even some scientists took up the cause. In 2007, evolutionary biologist (and atheist) David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York controversially described the new atheism as a "stealth religion". His point was that, like many religions, it portrayed itself as the only source of truth and righteousness and its enemies as "bad, bad, bad".

To atheists, such accusations might seem easily refuted. The defining feature of religion is belief in god(s). Atheism defines itself as the absence of belief in god. How can it be a religion? That is like saying that "off" is a TV channel, or not-playing-tennis is a sport.

But atheists arguably have not taken the charge seriously enough. "They'd say, the word just means 'without god'. That is all. We can go home now," says Jon Lanman who works on the scientific study of religion at Queen's University Belfast, UK. Perhaps because of this rather aloof response, atheists have failed to dispel the sense that the critics were on to something.

The truth is that atheism is not simply an absence of belief in god, but also a set of alternative beliefs about the origin and nature of reality. Even though these belief systems diverge in their content and level of fact from religious beliefs, perhaps they originate from the same underlying psychological processes, and fulfil similar psychological needs. Religious ideas, for example, provide stability and reassurance in the face of uncertainty. They help to explain events and provide a moral framework. For these reasons, and others, they are intuitively appealing to human brains. Maybe brains that reject supernatural ideas simply soak up naturalistic ones to take their place. "They may work as replacement beliefs, helping alleviate stress and anxiety as religion does," says Miguel Farias, leader of the brain, belief and behaviour group at Coventry University, UK.

One candidate for a replacement belief that atheists and others might hold is "progress". A few years ago, psychologists in the Netherlands tested this idea. It is well known that religious people often turn to their beliefs to deal with emotional distress. Faced with reminders of mortality, for example, they vigorously reaffirm their faith. This may be why churches are full of death imagery- it is good for business.

Does the idea of progress work the same magic for atheists? To find out, the team got volunteers with a secular world view to either write about their own deaths or about dental pain. Then participants read an essay arguing that progress was an illusion. Those who had been prompted to think about death disagreed more strongly with the essay. The anti-progress essay also made volunteers more aware of their own death, as if it were pulling their comfort blanket out from under their feet. A different essay arguing that progress had been substantial did the opposite. That's not all. Another primer known to strengthen religious belief is lack of control over external events. Clinging on to god can help people regain at least a subjective sense of control and predictability. And, yes, atheists do it too. Doing the "progress" experiment with people on board an aeroplane, for example, makes them espouse a stronger belief in progress.

For many atheists, scientific ideas have a similar soothing effect. Stressful situations tend to strengthen their belief in science, especially in theories that emphasise orderliness and predictability over randomness and unpredictability. All of which suggests that religious believers and atheists are more psychologically similar than either would like to think.

That could even extend to supernatural thinking. Proponents of the "psychological impossibility of atheism" argue that supernatural beliefs are so hard-wired into our brains that discarding them altogether is not an option. Evolution, they point out, has endowed us with a suite of cognitive tendencies that make belief in non- material beings come easily. As highly social and tribal animals, for example, we need to keep track of the thoughts and intentions of other people, even when they are not physically present.

From there, it is a short step to conceiving of non-physical entities such as spirits, gods and dead ancestors who have minds and intentions of their own, know what we are thinking and have some influence over our lives. And, sure enough, there is evidence that even hardcore atheists tend to entertain quasi-religious or spiritual ideas such as there being a higher power or that everything happens for a purpose.

However, even if letting go completely isn't an option, that doesn't mean that atheists are actually religious. "Intuitions about dualism, teleology, and magic are common among non-believers," says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Canada. But me case is much weaker for belief in God or gods, where cultural learning is much more powerful." And experiments show ma people can override their tendencies There is no evidence for the argument that all people have an implicit belief in me supernatural," says psychologist Marjaana Undeman at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

So, despite some similarity between religious and non-religious beliefs systems, they are not equivalent. Surely that buries the claim that atheism is just another religion? Maybe not. There is another way in which atheist beliefs make them religion-like, according to Sloan Wilson, it is the way they play fast-and-loose with scientific facts. "Atheists will say that religion is bad for humanity, that it's not an evolutionary adaptation - which happens not to be true," he says. "That is how atheism becomes an ideology. It is organised to motivate behaviour. If it uses counter-factual beliefs in order to do it then there's really very little difference between atheism and a religion ".

But if using non-factual beliefs to motivate behaviour is enough to make something a religion, then atheism isn't the only offender. Political campaigns are a religion; Father Christmas is a religion; self-help books are a religion. That would seem to lead to such a broad definition of religion that it is almost useless- and certainly doesn't make the accusation against atheism especially damning.

Besides, religion is not just about belief. There are many ways in which atheism is not like a religion, according to Dan Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. When somebody puts it to me that atheism is just another religion, he says: "I ask 'in what way?' They usually counter with demonstrably false parallels. We have no rituals, no membership rules, no sacred texts and the small percentage of atheists who belong to specifically atheist organisations are more like people who belong to interest groups like scuba divers or guitar aficionados. And most atheists don't feel the need to proselytise." Atheism lacks other features of religion too.

"Can atheism provide a strong sense of meaning and purpose?" asks Sloan Wilson. "Can it motivate people to prosocial action, can it get you out of bed in the morning with enthusiasm to do things? I think the answer is theoretically yes ... but only for a few individuals."

So there we have it. Atheism is both like a religion and not like one, depending on which aspects you consider. And therein lies the real problem, and the reason why the question of whether or not atheism is just another religion goes around and around in circles. Atheism is not one thing. Nor is religion.