To the degree that they attempt to supplant other ideologies yes.
My particular views are difficult to pin down. I am highly influenced by Christianity, but I generally believe that God is God. I don’t believe in the autonomy of the individual, that we are all parts of the larger categories that contain us, such as the state, the eco-system, clubs we belong to etc… I do not believe that cognition is an individual process as much as it is a social one. That in a vacuum our ability to form rational thought is very limited without the inculcation of moral and critical tradition. So, I am nominally a Christian in a way, as I do believe in the resurrection and eternal life, but I don’t take that to be so much literal, as a recognition of our nature as part of a collective consciousness.
No, my believes are too pantheistic and syncretic to really stake a claim to one particular religion.
My point is about what atheism would have to become in order to supplant the religious social order it attempts to supplant. Not about what its current state is. It matters that it denies the existence of Gods because that’s fundamental to the ideology. But the problem with belief systems based around the negation of other belief systems is that they leave a vacuum of belief that seeks to be filled. One must understand precisely what is engendered by the forms and rituals of the culture it attempts to supplant in order to effectively supplant that culture in order to manage the unintended consequences that occur. Also, belief tends to cohere around personality. People of a certain personality tend to gravitate toward the ideological options that most reflect their personality type. For instance a study just came out recently that says that Conservatives are more susceptible to fear than Liberals. So as such, those who are more fearful, or more specifically, fearful of change would gravitate toward conservatism. Just as those in a greater fear of their mortality might gravitate toward Christianity. The central conceit of atheism is the idea that because the atheist doesn’t need the belief, then others do not need the belief in God. This is irrespective of whether or not God actually exists.
So, what people generally blame religion for, I would blame the myopia of ideology for. The limited ability to perceive the greater implications of one’s actions is a part of the human experience, and oftentimes we tend to over-estimate our ability to comprehend the world around us, this is particularly pertinent when we exercise our will-to-power and attempt to organize and formulate a society. As such, an atheistic society in its attempts at pluralism and universalism is only as capable of forming a cohesive society as its elites are capable of empathizing with the plurality of human experience. Religious societies are similarly limited of course. At some point, someone gets left out of the social order and enmity forms, and the passion play of human grudges plays itself out within the social order. You may notice that I implicitly reject egalitarianism. I do not believe in equality, not as in I don’t believe people SHOULD be equal, but that I don’t believe that they CAN be equal. The idea that education can assuage ignorance is IMO a dangerous dogma. Some people are simply smarter than others, and that human culture needs hierarchy, not heterarchy, to function. Even if we were to establish a heterarchist plurality, eventually a hierarchical organization would form within the heterarchy and seek dominance. As such other hierarchies would coalesce to oppose that hierarchy, and you would be right back where you were with competing hierarchies. The aesthetic representation, while important, is irrelevant to whether or not it would formulate conflict.
In the end of the day the only way belief goes away is for those who believe it to die out. Therefore the only way to end belief actively is to kill off those who believe a certain way.
There is also the matter of the way cultural forms concentrate as their numbers dwindle, particularly if it’s due to outside pressures. As Christianity feels under attack, Christians will circle the wagons and the impetus to remain within the in-group will become stronger. The end-result would be that the counter-narrative would have to reorganize itself in a way that would allow it to attack Christianity in new and innovative ways. In this way, culture reforms itself in ways that mirror the culture that it opposes. We see this throughout history in the way wars introduce the ideas of both the aggressor culture and the defensive culture to one another. Americans know more about Islam today than they did on September 10th, 2001, just as the Taliban has relaxed its restrictions on mass media in order to use mass media as a weapon in its culture war.
As such, I might be a good example of this process. As my views are highly influenced by atheism, even though I myself am not an atheist.
