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I don't think they do. In fact many of the atheists i met are very open minded about religion. They actually respect religious people. So no, they don't hate religion. They just don't believe in it.

Open-minded to what?

Regardless, the terms do not represent comparable things or concepts.

Atheism simply means a disbelief in deities. It is not a belief system, religion, philosophy, or lifestyle. Other than not believing in God(s), Atheists have nothing else in common

Except that when you Google or DuckDuckGo search on "atheism religion" you get all kinds of sites that show that atheism is essentially a religion. Of course, you get other sites that deny such. But when you do the comparison yourself, you'll see that there isn't much, if any, difference between what it takes to make a religion and the thing that atheism is.

In other words, atheism is a religion that is different from most formal religions in two major ways:
1. They express that there is no god/God;
2. They often express that they are not a religion.

Can you define what you mean by "religion"? I'd always thought it included -- by necessity -- a belief in a god, but you don't seem to think this is true?

There are dictionaries all over the place. A couple of online dictionaries are found here http://dictionary.reference.com/ and here http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/.

You might also try Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion.

From Wikipedia then:

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"A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence."

This is not atheism. Atheism is not a belief, it's a lack of belief. It's not a belief in not-God, it's just a position that gods and god belief systems are irrlevant. I don't have to believe, I just have to ignore it like I ignore much in life that I find irrelevant.

Analogously, I don't have any beliefs about flamingoes. They may or may not exist but I don't really mind either way, they're irrelevant to me -- just like the many gods that in which people claim to believe.

I think it best to let atheists speak for themselves so here's a link for you straight from the horses mouth, so to speak: https://atheists.org/activism/resources/what-is-atheism

From that link:

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"Atheism is not a belief system nor is it a religion. While there are some religions that are atheistic (certain sects of Buddhism, for example), that does not mean that atheism is a religion. Two commonly used retorts to the nonsense that atheism is a religion are: 1) If atheism is a religion then bald is a hair color, and 2) If atheism is a religion then health is a disease. A new one introduced in 2012 by Bill Maher is, "If atheism is a religion, then abstinence is a sexual position."

From the simple standpoint, neither atheism, nor theism are religions. But consider this example of science.

To the hard-working, professional scientist, one who delves into the depths of finding knowledge about the workings of nature, science is a simple thing. To him science amounts to, "What is there? and how do I find it out and the why's of it?"

To the simple scientist or to the layman, Science includes all the engineering and the usage of things developed from the engineering.

In the same way, theism is religion at the same time it is not religion, and so is atheism... and just about anything that people live in their lives, including the public understanding of science. Why? Because there is little knowledge, and much belief that people live by.

The big difference is that while the science guy is trying to find the answer by looking at the evidence, religion say they have the answer in their book and tries to fit the evidence to it. If it doesn't fit, religion doesn't change it's view to fit the evidence like science do, they just say. " it doesn't fit what the book says, so it can't be true"

Religions say that they have the answers to the things that they have the answers to. For example. The Bible tells about the creation of the universe. But it doesn't talk about every blade of grass, or mention every person by name who will ever exist.

Science doesn't have much evidence about the creation (or whatever science tries to suggest takes creation's place). But they talk about it like they know what it is all about. For example, if the Big Bang ever happened, nobody knows, and any scientist could postulate a hundred other things that might take the place of the Big Bang.

Yet, science can investigate many of the blades of grass that religion doesn't talk about individually. And, science can investigate many of the people, both living and dead, that religion only suggests might have existed.

People in both religion and science exaggerate what they know and understand, at times. Yet there are few things in religious writings that express the facts that science finds out as clearly as science does.

One of the things that science and the Christian religion agree on is the fact that God exists. Some of the people in both, science and the Christian religion, suggest that God doesn't exist. The point is this. Pure science mostly expresses little, tiny facts. Pure religion expresses believable doctrine.

Because Christians should not marvel about these things, that is what I read in the bible. Bible is just a metaphorical guideline of history, morals lessons, and faith.