Atheist is an absence of belief. No one can teach you that, it is a choice.

I see your piece as conflating religion with the need for companionship. See also @snytiger6's reply.

@anglophone I'd be interested in knowing which paragraph/s lead you to that conclusion. If I knew what actual context was so leaning for you, that would help. If you're talking about his reply to your comment directly below, I'm about to deliver an opinion based basically on the same line of thought, with some twist. Which can be correlated to many aspects of society other than just religion. I'll begin by working with some of his statements.

"I've known thinking people who have converted to religion. I think it is more that they seek a sense of belonging than anything else."

I'll first argue that there's a probability that billions of people spread out around the world over centuries have been forced into religions due to conquering nations. Who had their own views and values developed from their experiences in which each essentially entailed multiple gods and or entities. With a significant, if not all of, were based off the "havens" and or star people. That their dead would go off to.

I'm not going to suggest that this would totally void the suggestion of "thinking people who have converted to religion" it's probable that some have. But I would suggest considering the means that were used towards the conversion. I'll argue that thinking people just don't convert to something that isn't provable. Unable to touch and see. Not without a measure of deceptive convincing.

When I was a teenager, I believe I was 14 or 15 at the time, my mom decided I was on the wrong path while in the grips of her deadlock religious phase. I was struggling with my placement in society and already questioning the "reality" of people and the social structure around me. Which I have done since elementary school. I was already picking up on the hypocrisy of multiple terminologies used in politics and society and highly confused as why socialism had such a widespread target on it. In regards to the term socialism, to me it only seemed logical that a society in which socialism is a derivative of, would be the most beneficial to a society. And what I was hearing from all that around me was a distortion of the meanings, reflecting back in essentially all of reality.

So, one day mom's preacher shows up at the house and engages in an attempt to "convert" me. I'm upset and embarrassed over the entire ordeal while he engages in trying to suggest all my problems can be solved by god and being saved. Yes, crying also. He's failed to provide any realistic answers to me on my social questioning other than it can all be well with being saved. Long story short. After I drill him and press him on the proof of god, he delivers to me, paraphrasing of course after all this time, that it's better to put faith in god than not having faith if there is a god. I go through the motions to get rid of the jerk totally convinced religion is a racket. And that I've just been emotionally and mentally abused.

So, I kind of have an issue with the suggestion that people just convert. Do they convert because they're emotionally handicapped, find themselves in the grasp of a vulnerable problematic time in front of the wrong people who see a means to take advantage of them? In my case, a relative or friend so blindly intertwined in religion they become a portal of a persons, or groups, deliverance? I mention group due to the medical and government --- often comprising of social services, entities that are often portals to organized religion and or phycological procedures. In which I find the latter there to be a widespread scam on society that does more harm than good also.

The essential thing to understand is that most people tend to be followers, than leaders. Leaders come in 2 categories. Leaders can be sincere people who have a genuine nature and intentions of doing good for people. Then you have leaders who are out for beneficiary means, power and or money, and will work within deceptive agendas as singular and or an atmosphere of conglomerates. Sometimes the members of the first group become victimized by the latter group and forced into a deceptive atmosphere. In which they have to chose to abandon or become compliant and complicit. That reverberates throughout organized religions and governments on the politician scale. It also reverberates throughout many groups that have been founded in which they initially projected a sincere course of social activistic nature, but have been overwhelmed by their party affiliation and or corporate donors which inevitable ends up diminishing their initial project. The top leaders of the movement become beholden to the money and cipher off the treasury for personal gains. Black Lives Matter is a primary example in recent years of how this occurs.

I think that actually covers his first 2 paragraphs. I'll add however that I think he throws around the comment of people thinking to be way to freely. While he suggests people to be followers at such the ratio projected, as I do also, is an indication that they're allowing someone else to do the majority of the thinking? At the current levels today, I'll argue that there's a lot of people allowing the wrong people to do the thinking! And they're blindly complacent and complicit in the crimes of these people and the continuance of unethical practices. And in regards to party lines, they fail to recognize that they're supporting the same crimes and unethical practices of those they continue to support and or fund in which they only seem to observe those injustices coming from the other side. And when people like me and or journalistic work we use to confront them with this fact, they almost always tend to deliver a sense of hypocrisy as a retort. Often an attempt to change the narrative and or context, whether it targets us or our sources, is delivered in our attempt to debate them towards fitting a reality that doesn't exist. The people in western societies aren't actually thinking. Especially in the US. While Europe has a better hand and mind on the reality of world affairs, the societies of the US and Canada are far from actually thinking for themselves. We are the most negatively indoctrinated societies on the planet, with the US by far being the worst. The amount of people in this very community who have free thinker on their profile is ludicrous when you observe how indoctrinated they are into the delusional reality that has been manufactured for us. And the cognitive dissonance they display when anyone attempts to lead them out of that delusional reality is profoundly saddening.

"Unfortunately, religion fills that instinctual need to belong to a group which provides that instinctual need that gives some people a sense of safety and comfort.

Ironically, it is our evolutionary past that makes people open to religion, while religion generally denies our evolutionary past."

I'll go at both of these at the same time. The top paragraph is fairly correlated to much of what I've already given my opinion on in regards to religions, activism, and government. The now growing fascist movement in the US can be used as a prime example. People who have been manipulated into believing their way of life is under attack by the various useless rhetoric's of right wing politicians, fascist and nationalist groups, and far right religions, now have a false sense of security in grouping with these entities on multiple fronts. Not only our they hypocritical to their own beliefs, but the government and people leading them into a delusional reality are hypocritically deceptive to them. They don't recognize that they're being used for an agenda that will betray them right along with the rest of us if that agenda was to successfully play out. They actually believe, like all those who are divided by party lines, that there are 2 sides to government that a civil war is needed to secure their way of life. Their sick view of what America means. When there's really 2 matters at hand that have nothing to do with government or party lines. Capitalism, and control of the population via information narratives. In which the latter there has created the delusional reality they're stuck in, just as all the rest who live divided by party lines. Every one of them missing the commonality that we're all facing. That we're all virtually on the same ship with a virus aboard that wants to wipe us all out while the system floats abroad watching us eat each other.

I find it ironic that he believes a human construct is correlated to an evolution where religion had no existence. The lack of context is deceptive. Which I fairly covered above. There's more evidence today that aliens were misinterpreted as the initial gods, plural, along with the technology they brought with them. Ancient civilizations X3 essentially behold the same story lines as those before them. The only proven substances within the Bible are various people who lived in the time the Bible was supposedly written, by those people. God and Jesus obviously didn't write the Bible. How did the later of the 3 know the story line of the previous 2? Before this, we find stone carvings of conjecture of the gods and machines before them with interpretations of seemingly things they couldn't understand. And there has been an unmeasurable amount of human history left out of that Bible, much of it on purpose. In which a lot of that history was destroyed or confiscated when conquering armies invaded people who knew not any religion, then had religion forced on them. Religion doesn't fill an instinctive need that had always existed, it enslaves it. It took people from what they already practiced. The good or bad can be argued in regards to ancient societies. Obviously there has been some gruesome conjectures of them. But the church has been deceiving us since its manafication. It's essentially at odds with all societies in the same manner as western governments. In which it also has an agenda to keep us dumbed down, stupid, and unaware of reality. In which it has also been a centuries long struggle for humanity to uncover the truths as we've been fighting with governments.

@William_Mary If you cannot express an idea in 20 words or fewer, then you cannot communicate it effectively.

@anglophone that's why fake news is winning. The lack of context it's constructed within has turn most people into lazy information gatherers. They're so more easily vulnerable into being conned when the essential aspects of communication are left out. It's like fast food that poisons the body when treated as an essential diet. When information is trapped within a suppressed amount of characters, it poisons the brain. Your suggestion and the opinion you're feeding people here would suggest they never open an article that is meant to genuinely inform them properly. You're attempting to betray those associated around you in doing so.

@William_Mary I will leave you to drown in the swamp of your own red herrings.

I've known thinking people who have converted to religion. I think it is more that they seek a sense of belonging than anything else.

Humans as animals evolved an instinctual need to belong to groups (or herds) for purposes of safety. Just because humans are now capable of thinking, does not mean that those animal instincts to belong to a group, and by belonging they will still feel an instinctual sense of safety and comfort.

Unfortunately, religion fills that instinctual need to belong to a group which provides that instinctual need that gives some people a sense of safety and comfort.

Ironically, it is our evolutionary past that makes people open to religion, while religion generally denies our evolutionary past.

My 2 daughters claim to be Christians. Maybe they remember my past and maybe things today scare them to death. I'm not sure. Book of Revelation scares many but you have to investigate where these books came from and why are they included. My kids do not get it but they claim to understand why I no longer believe.

That's also what Unitarian churches do. In their religious ed classes for kids, they teach them about world religions, as well as the typical American ones of Christian and Catholic, as well as Unitarian beliefs, which are really just sets of traditions and principles, and then let the kids decide for themselves what they believe and what makes sense. As Robin Williams used to say,
" What a concept!".... Unlike the fundies, we aren't trying to dominate and control others...