A new 'religion'.

Byline: Iftikhar U. Hyder

WHEN English philosopher the late Antony Flew, who was once called 'the world's most influential philosophical atheist', announced his rejection of atheism in 2004, many atheists - including Richard Dawkins - criticised him for being irrational.

Flew's response at the time was that Dawkins irrationally believed that there was no God. He also believed that Dawkins was simply spreading his own convictions and said that Dawkins had not set out to 'discover and spread knowledge of the existence or nonexistence of God'.

It can be argued that atheism, in its various manifestations today, has evolved into a 'religion'. Martin Hagglund, a Swedish-American philosopher at Yale University, recently published a book in which he offers an alternative to traditional religion. He calls it 'secular faith'. Hagglund says, 'what defines secular faith most fundamentally is that the object of faith is totally dependent on the practice of faith'. He says that in religious faith 'is the additional idea that there is a special object of faith, like God or eternity or Nirvana, something that ultimately doesn't depend on the practise of faith, something that exists independently and eternally'.

Atheists in science have sought to assert their authority.

Atheism's convergence with religion is ironic. To many atheists, a belief in God is irrational and unsupported by evidence. Yet, many atheists themselves are irrational in their belief which is also not supported by any evidence.

Another example of this convergence includes atheists' support groups similar to those that are associated with religion. In a 2015 article, journalist Christina Greta observed, '... in the last few years, secular support systems have been flowering like ... well, like flowers. Like flowers in a movie about mutant radioactive flowers, growing at astonishing rates and to colossal size'.

Normally support systems are built around a common system of belief or identity. By building more and more support systems to fill the emotional and psychological needs of humans that for millennia have been filled by religion, atheism is increasingly beginning to resemble a 'religion', whose core belief is that there is no God. Indeed, one of the reasons behind the recent rise in atheism in the West is 'superior secular alternatives to services' that traditionally houses of worship have provided.

In the West, some zealous atheist communities have even been attempting to replace...