At no point have I been conscious of receiving reverence.
I shouldn't need to point this out, but at no point in that 20 years have you been religion - you've been, no doubt, a proponent. I'd also suggest that 'message boards like this' are not particularly representative of society at large.
Regarding Church history and false equivalence with modern atheism. Some atheists embrace the comparison.
Not that I've noticed, but I suppose it's possible.
The Atheist experience led by Matt Dillahunty happily answered the question why do christians contribute more to charity in the following way. 'Christianity, the commentator said had a far longer history than atheist charity'. You see the equation there and not only equation but a competitive spirit also.
So much wrong here... in the US (which Dillahunty was most likely commenting on, though I don't know that for certain) the figures are fairly clear that the religious give more, with the understanding that every donation to their churches automatically qualifies as 'charity' even if it's not for charitable works but say for maintenance and repairs, and notwithstanding the fact that the relatively affluent middle-classes who have the free capital to give to charity are more likely to be religious than their less well-off neighbours. In the rest of the developed world this is not the case, and we don't see the pattern replicated anywhere near as strongly.
All of which addresses to some degree the idea of whether you can be good with or without religion, but it doesn't speak to whether an organisation is 'religious' or not.
Of course the problem for what calls itself The Atheist Community of Austin is that Not only can atheism expect more charity but also more abuse of it's members by it's leadership and every other bit of the baggage of organised religion/atheism including violence.
Any social gathering has the potential for abuse of the social structure, and newer organisations arguably moreso than older ones. When you can come back and show an atheist social organisation with decades of misogynistic abuse like the Magdalen Laundries, or decades of institutional cover-ups like the Catholic Church paedophile problems, or the decades of homophobic campaigning like the Anglican community over the latter half of the twentieth century, or the centuries of misogyny in pretty much every Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim and even Buddhist tradition in the world then maybe individual instance of problematic behaviour will start to put them on an equal footing, just as soon as you demonstrate how those people tie their atheism to their behaviour in the way the religions explicitly tied their tenets to their discrimination.
O.
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