[Ed: I see you edited your original comment to be less general. To address that, I'd say you're seeing similarities that aren't characteristic of religions, but

[Ed: I see you edited your original comment to be less general. To address that, I'd say you're seeing similarities that aren't characteristic of religions, but of humans rooting for their team. Your last sentence applies just as well to "loud fans".] This is as wrong as calling the technological singularity idea a "rapture of the nerds."[1] It's important to separate religious-minded-thinking, which is more generally irrational (or if you prefer a less general statement for the sake of argument, non-scientific) thinking, from an actual religion. Do atheists suffer from the same cognitive biases religious people do? Of course. Do some of them (I'd guess a minority) make errors in probabilistic reasoning by assigning p(a god exists|observations) = 0, actual 0, rather than the technical 0+epsilon that permits Bayesian updating in case a god ever decides to show itself? Sure. None of this makes atheism a religion. Where's the promise of salvation, but only for atheists? Where's the Holy Book? Where's the rituals and traditions? Are you called an "inactive atheist" if you don't go to chu^H^H^H weekly meetups and thus get shunned by your fellow atheists? Where's the singular code of morality? Where are the articles of faith? If you spend five minutes thinking about it, can you think of other ways atheism differs, categorically, from a religion like Mormonism? [1]http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21 http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21