I can agree to call Atheism a religion, though that would probably make them angry. I do not accept it as a superior way of knowledge and belief however. Here is why.

The most common yardstick on the value of a religion used by philosophers is a religion defines a set of moral codes and morays to be adhered to by the populace to ensure they don’t all rape and kill each other.

Historically this provided an institutionalized power base for religious leaders to wield independent of, and sometimes over, kingdoms. What I’m saying is the Catholic Church had it’s own armies (knights Hospitallers and Knights Templars) in all the European nations. They could enforce their own, purely subjective, laws and punishments. The Kings could not stand in their way for fear of reprisal from a zealous and superstitious populace. Similar to the situation the Saudi Royal family find themselves in today.

Using religion to enforce artificial moral standards in a purely subjective form by a bunch of sadistic rapists, torturers and murderers is ludicrous, but it happened. Further they justified this in the name of a guy who denounced the “laws of Man” and saved a woman from being stoned by a superstitious mob.

I think from this we can say defining the value of religion as the enforcement of morality is open to abuse, subjective and should be abandoned. This nullifies this yardstick as a factor to determine worth of any religion, including Atheism.

Atheists can say that people should do the right thing because it’s the right thing. That no reward should be necessary to get them to do the right thing. This is correct. But this argument has no bearing as the laws of a duly elected open society are preferable. The populace gets to influence those laws so they are more accepted (therefore follwed more often) and and adapt with time. It is impossible to enforce morality, and more often then not those attempting to do so are themselves completely amoral.

Another yardstick, and a better one, is the search for truth. Gnosticism is based on the term Gnosis; in Greek Knowledge. As scientists and philosophers seek “the truth” about the possibility of a divine creator who spawned the universe with all it’s physical qualities and/or life itself they find one thing, they don’t know.

An example is the search for the gravitron. The gravitron is a subatomic partical (a boson) that is believed to be responsible for the physical property of mass attraction. So if we find this boson in the mass collider what have we discovered about the possibility of a grand creator? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t mean the boson wasn’t created by a divine or supreme power. It just means we don’t know.

An atheist enshrines logic. Therefore, in the search for truth the atheist must admit he doesn’t know, and that makes him an instant agnostic. On the atheistic logical argument he defeats his own belief.